This is actually my preferred config. The reason being emacs shell buffers. I can interact with any shell tool using the full text editing features of emacs. I've had to interact with many Oracle databases via sqlplus. "sqlplus" is not a fun tool to use on the shell. However in emacs it is perfectly fine and works as well as the command line interfaces from PostGRE or MySQL. The inline shell also allows automatic history, block selecting and line truncate/wrapping controls across all tools. However for pure text editing, it's always vim for me. I've even found myself launching emacs+shell within tmux in one pane and vim in another.
Sorry, unrelated nitpick but the name is PostgreSQL or Postgres. Postgres started in 1986 as a followup to Ingres and the name was meant to mean after-Ingres. The query language was later replaced with SQL and the name changed again to a portmanteau of Postgres SQL
Have you tried sqlcl from Oracle? 20 meg download (requires java). Up down left right work. Use sql hr@ instead of sqlplus hr
@ (I am one of the developers.) . I should try it from within Emacs.
