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Worst: sqlplus by Oracle. No autocomplete, no backspace, no history function. It's like nobody ever inside Oracle ever had to use this craptastic piece of software to accomplish anything.

EDIT: Oops backspace works. Might have been a combination of putty and sqlplus. Nevermind.

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A lot of people forget that the default shells of many *nix systems through at least the mid 90s did not support any of these. No line editing, no interactive history (primitive !-based history doesn’t count), no completion.

Occasionally I’ll still encounter an environment that only has a minimalist implementation of sh (e.g. some busybox builds) and be totally stymied. It amazes me how much people accomplished on old *nix systems with such abysmal usability.

Sure but it's been over 20 years. Readline already existed back then and sqlplus is still the default command line tool for their DBMS.

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