Search or pipe messages?

I see that both the :syntax list and :au commands can be filtered by
various aspects. But, when first trying to narrow something down (and
learning how these things work), the first thing to do is to run them
unfiltered. But, then I want to be able to search within that output.

Is there some way to do that already? Or is there a way to use an
external pager ('less')?

In :help pager, I see:

: stop the listing and enter a
command-line

But, I can't tell if there's then some way to "copy all this message's
text"

and, there's:

<C-Y> yank (copy) a modeless selection to
the clipboard ("* and "+ registers)

But, that requires the mouse (cf. :help modeless-selection), so doesn't
seem suited to capture the message in its entirety.

I also tried doing this via:

$ vim +"set term=dumb" +au +q | less

but the output's a mess.

--
Thanks in advance,
Ben

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