Thanks Warren. I was sending the output to /dev/null thinking everything was fine. I installed libreadline-dev. I still get these messages checking for library containing readline... no checking for library containing tgetent... -lncurses checking for readline in -lreadline... yes checking readline.h usability... no checking readline.h presence... no checking for readline.h... no checking for /usr/include/readline.h... no checking for /usr/include/readline/readline.h... yes Is there something else I'm missing? Either way, the arrow keys do now scroll through the history. I'm assuming When I installed 3.33 using 'sudo apt install sqlite3' ubuntu automatically installed libreadline-dev and then uninstalled it when I purged as otherwise I'd be wondering why 3.33 scrolled through the history without me installing libreadline-dev. Thanks Warren. PS It did nothing for bottom line error which I assume is a vscode / wsl problem. There's a video of it at https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/116174