On Sun, 15 Nov 1998, Steve Revilak wrote:

> A few days ago, while writing a shell script, I found myself doing a
> little digging through the sh man pages and I came across something that
> I had never noticed before.  The -E option...which enables 'emacs style
> command-line editing'.  You know, that's pretty friendly.  The forward
> and back arrows work...and up recalls the last command executed.

The default shell, "sh", is really "ash".

You can also do a "set -o emacs" or "set -o vi" from within the shell.
With vi keys, you have to do an escape before the arrows work (the
down arrow works as an escape, too), but then you get the benefits of
the vi command line editing.