OS X (Snow Leopard) Terminal Wish-List

Answers may exist for these questions, but I don’t know them.

I wish I did, and my google-fu is weak.

1. How can I get Terminal.app to preserve the highlighted state of previously-selected text when I paste into that window? E.g., I often need to copy & paste the same “put” command in an sftp session. In Tiger’s (10.4.x) Terminal.app, I could simply click once on the appropriate Terminal window, the text would remain highlighted, copy, paste & be on my way. Since the upgrade to 10.6.x, however, the paste action causes the previously-dragged text selection highlight to disappear; after pasting, nothing is selected. Now I must re-drag to select, copy and paste every time.

2. Why doesn’t the up arrow work in sftp? On the command line and in an ssh session, you can press the up arrow to scroll through the list of previously-issued commands. Not so in the sftp client on OS X. Why not? Is there something I can configure on the client or server side to make this work properly?

I tried using iTerm instead of Terminal.app. Text remains highlighted after pasting, but iTerm doesn’t highlight or select end-of-line characters. I have to press the return key manually each time to enter the command. And the up arrow doesn’t work either. X11′s xterm is a piece of shit.

So what fixes or options exist to circumvent this behavior?