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!