Sigh. This has tripped me up several times and made me think something was wrong with my setup. Good to know. IDEs Support - can't debug when using cmd readline and command completion.

From one of the posters, "readline works only in a real terminal. The output console that you get in PyCharm (and presumably in any other Python IDE) is not a real terminal."

The solution, the post says, is to "Remote debug should work as long as you launch your program from a terminal and not from PyCharm."

So, there you go.

Also, in

• Remote Debugging with PyCharm
• How do I start up remote debugging with PyCharm?

#### ============== this code added ================================================================:
import sys
sys.path.append("pydevd-pycharm.egg")
import pydevd_pycharm

pydevd_pycharm.settrace('172.20.208.95', port=12345, stdoutToServer=True,
                        stderrToServer=True)
#### ================================================================================================

This code above is where (I think) you would set the settrace that was mentioned in the first link. Here are the setting that he had:

 pydevd.settrace(debug_host, port=8888, suspend=False,
         stdoutToServer=False, stderrToServer=False)

After running it without this, I think I see what it does and why it would mess the readline support up.

Ok, and one more PyCharm 2020.1 - Debug is needed so that you can find the pydevd-pycharm.egg that is needed. It has examples and pip commands (i.e. - pip install pydevd-pycharm~=191.3490) but it seems you have to not be VPN'ed into TDA to get it to install. So, I will try later without the VPN.

Good thing is that the link above explains all of the parameters for the settrace call. Might be able to default several of them, but will have to take time to try it out.