Well, you can go quite far with a few simple tweaks to Ctrl+R.

    # disable flow control (Ctrl+S now searches forward in history)
    if [ -t 0 ]; then
      stty -ixon
    fi

And then add the partial search to arrows:

    > cat .inputrc 
    $include /etc/inputrc
    
    "\e[A": history-search-backward
    "\e[B": history-search-forward

All that in bash.