What specifically are you looking for? It has history search but it sounds like you’re looking for something specific?
Not sure if fish has this or not, but I use reverse search in bash exhaustively.
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).
There's no need to enter a separate mode via ctrl-r.