Integration

This is likely more of a ubuntu issue than a sqlcl isue.

. Do the <TAB> key and cursor keys behave as expected in the shell (BEFORE starting sqlcl)?

. What shell are you in/using?

  $  echo $SHELL

bash will be the most likely shell to behave "properly" with no changes on your part.

If it is not bash, you can change it by:

  $ sudo chsh -s /bin/bash <username>

. Does the <TAB> and the cursor keys behave as expected in the shell now?

          up/down should show previous/next commands you've executed in this shell. <TAB> is auto-complete/show files in current directory.

If that's working, try starting sqlcl "now" and see how you go.

If that doesn't fix your keys, then perhaps other answers here may help:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/325807/arrow-keys-home-end-tab-complete-keys-not-working-in-shell

I figured it out finally via strace: SQLcl uses the readline library and reads ~/.inputrc. In particular SQLcl doesn't cope with assigning "menu-complete" to the Tab key and history-search-backward/history-search-forward to the cursor keys. I tried setting $INPUTRC to /dev/null for SQLcl but this didn't work. At least I know now what's going on.

Works fine on CentOS7 and connecting to the linux server with putty, so sqlcl isn't the issue.

You need a ~/.inputrc with the following lines to demonstrate the issue:

"\t": menu-complete

"\eOA": history-search-backward

"\eOB": history-search-forward

The cursor key code might depend on your terminal. But the "\t" should work regardless of the terminal emulator.

sql /nolog

sele<TAB>

will complete to SELECT without menu-complete set and will do nothing with menu-complete set.

Would be really nice to get a bug fix for this. Confirm that if
"\eOA": history-search-backward
"\eOB": history-search-forward
(or the VT220 equivalents, "\e[A" and "\e[B")
are set in .inputrc, history access in sqlcl does not work with up and down arrows
Those bindings allow context sensitive history in e.g. Bash - ls [up] will go to the previous command that started with ls
I don't necessarily need the sqlcl history to be context sensitive, I just need the arrow keys to still work at all.

A workaround could be to use a shell script wrapper that does
bind -r "\e[A"; bind -r "\e[B"
before invoking sqlcl, this unbinds the up and down arrows and then they work in sqlcl (or the eOA eOB versions if that is what you use)