I'm personally achieving something like this with a combination of binding Ctrl-R to fzf's history search and using zsh's vim command edit mode: https://asciinema.org/a/fELHDWUytNGMBEFBGEjo5jJO7

Are your dotfiles available anywhere? I'd be interested in trying out this setup.

It's a bit messy, but everything related to zsh should be in here [1]. Apparently the vim command editor thing comes at least partly from prezto [2]