Do this at the command prompt, or once in your ~/.bash_profile to make it permanent:
set -o vi
After that, you can search for any of the commands in your history, edit it, and then execute the edited command, by doing this:
At the prompt, type Esc once to get into vi command mode. Then you can press the k key repeatedly to scroll up through the command history, or (often easier) use the ? (search backward) vi command to search for a pattern to find a specific command. Once found, press v to edit it in a temp file. Then when you save and quit, the edited command gets executed.
The same technique works with emacs as the editor instead of vi, if you don't give the 'set -o vi' command, because the default editor for command line history is emacs. Also, if you have run 'set -o vi', you can switch the editor for commands back to emacs with 'set -o emacs'.
The 'set -o <editor>' bit sets the readline editing environment to be similar to vi. It can be set to emacs.
C-xC-e (edit-and-execute-command) invokes the editor specified by $VISUAL, $EDITOR, or emacs, in that order. You could set it to scrivner if you wanted to (though I'm not sure that would necessarily work on exit).
I've tested with VISUAL set to nedit, from which I then changed it to uptime. Now I get loadavg when I want to edit my command line ;-)
set editing-mode vi
in your ~/.inputrc (instead) and all GNU libreadline using programs will give you vi keys instead of emacs :-)
It's better than nothing though.
At the shell, it's true that you're limited to vi-style controls (so no text objects like ci").
However, once you press 'v' in normal mode you can drop into either vi or vim - this only depends on what $EDITOR is set to[1].