Oracle default cli, sqlplus, doesn’t support readline, so you can’t navigate thru commands or search in history.
You’ll enable – between the others:
- the four arrows
- ^R
- ESC .
- CTRL+U and CTRL+Y
Use  one of those two readline wrapper you can really speed up your job:
* rlfe
* rlwrap (apt-get install rlwrap)
After building, run
# rlwrap sqlplus
Enjoy!