it's more likely because she's running a version of dash compiled without readline support, probably debian's version (which is compiled that way because it's not intended as an interactive shell, but rather the lightest-weight posix-compliant shell they could build)

i agree about ansi sequences. even that doesn't go far enough, though: we should probably be moving past character-cell terminals to something better so we can have things like proportional fonts, multiple font sizes, properly spaced borders, and rounded corners