I used to use Control-R a lot and now use the fish equivalent:
https://fishshell.com/docs/current/interactive.html#searchab...
I find it to be more polished and especially like the way it works with fragments (e.g. if you start typing "git log" and hit Option/Alt-ꜛ it will find commands prefixed with that whereas bash Control-R requires you to hit Control-R first and then type that, which isn't as handy when you realize you want to search halfway through).
In fish: Just enter the text you want to look for into the commandline and press [up].
There's no need to enter a separate mode via ctrl-r.
Not sure if fish has this or not, but I use reverse search in bash exhaustively.