nion's blog

It seems to be possible to highlight URLs in urxvt and to open them in a browser with a mouse event similar to the terminal emulators the big desktop environments use.
This is possible via various perl extensions (see man 3 urxvtperl). I use the following in ~/.Xdefaults and make use of the settings on X start via xrdb -merge ~/.Xdefaults but you can also use them by executing urxvt with the -pi option.

URxvt.perl-ext-common: default,matcher enables the string matcher extension and default turns on a set of default configuration values.
The mouse button to open the URL can be specified via URxvt.matcher.button: (by default it's the middle mouse button). You can also specify your own sets of regular expressions to match any string in the terminal and specify different launcher events for each of them. I didn't see this before as I switched from aterm to rxvt-unicode because aterm is not maintained upstream anymore, has quite a few bugs, urxvt has unicode support and the command line options of aterm are a subset of urxvt's

I read very often that people can't use copy & paste in a text mode application that makes use of ncurses. People who use elinks also know what I am talking about (ok, elinks doesn't use ncurses but the problem is basically the same).

All of these tools installed mouse handlers, in ncurses this is done for example via the mousemask(3) function. Copy & paste is not done by the application but by the terminal. So if you can't copy or paste from such a text mode application that's basically because your mouse button event (that you use for pasting or copying) is not handled by the application (e.g. there is no functionality associated with it) and it also doesn't reach the terminal because of the mouse handler.

But there is a simple workaround nearly every terminal provides to directly interferact with the terminal, the shift key (that's what lets you scroll up in a terminal using shift-pageup too)