gnuplot should be compiled --with-readline=gnu

[Forest Bond]

Binary package hint: gnuplot

Many other command-line utilities ship with GNU readline support. Why not gnuplot? Everyone has different preferences on keybindings, and GNU readline is probably the best way to accomodate that.

-Forest

[Andrea (gresenen)]

From this discussion (dating back to 2001!) it appears the omission is due to a license issue: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=102729

[Andrea (gresenen)]

There's a workaround described at [1]: Install 'rlwrap' and run gnuplot as
  rlwrap -a -c -b\"\\\"\\\"\\\'\\\'\" gnuplot
You can add
  alias gnuplot="rlwrap -a -c -b\"\\\"\\\"\\\'\\\'\" gnuplot"
to your ~/.bashrc to do that automatically.

1 https://math65740.blogspot.com/2012/09/installing-and-running-gnuplot-on-ubuntu.html