[oblio]

I'm pretty sure it's block/column selection instead of line selection.

Why they made that design decision, we will never know. Maybe a dev was working with a lot of hex output? (even so, he should be slapped retroactively, unless he's Raymond Chen, cause Raymond Chen is amazing so we'll forgive his transgressions)

[tom_]

The console 'screen' is a grid of (character,attribute) pairs, so there are no lines as such...

I'm not sure the box selection is super useful these days, but in the late 80s/early 90s, GUI-style interfaces were very popular, and a box selection makes a certain amount of sense, so you can avoid picking up borders and so on. Would have been nice if they'd got both types in from day 1 though...

[icc97]

This is one of the major changes that happened since this team started working on the console. In Windows 10 it has line selection that flows correctly over line breaks.