I'm familiar with ctrl-r, but I still very much like the up-arrow behavior described by that commenter.

Atuin[1] feels like the best of both worlds to me.

[1] https://github.com/atuinsh/atuin

There is a difference, I believe. Doesn't Ctrl+r do a substring search instead?

And once you want to one-up this look into fzf.

If you use multiple terminals it kinda sucks unless you do export PROMPT_COMMAND='history -a' in your.bashrc or something cause only the last closed terminal saves to history

Prefix search is faster for the majority of cases. CTRL-r / FZF is useful for the remaining ones.

export EDITOR=vi and then hitting Esc puts you into vi mode; k, j to move up/down through history or pressing / to search etc including using regex is all available.

Ctrl-r can’t replace prefix search.