You seem like the kind of person who'd appreciate Percol[1]. It's fantastic for shell history. I have it bound to Ctrl+R:

    history | percol --prompt-bottom --result-bottom-up

I'm using fish, so the whole thing looks like this:

    function _percol_key_bindings

            function __percol_ctrl_r
                    set tempfile (mktemp)
                    history | percol --prompt-bottom --result-bottom-up >$tempfile
                    and commandline (cat $tempfile)
                    commandline -f repaint
                    rm -f $tempfile
            end

            # Bind Ctrl+R to percol history function for now
            bind \cr '__percol_ctrl_r'
    end

[1]https://github.com/mooz/percol/