You are probably referring to fish shell which has this feature (https://fishshell.com/).
However, I find that zsh + ohmyzsh works just as well. After typing the beginning of a command you can use the arrow keys to cycle through all commands in the history with the same beginning.
A third method for efficient history search is ctrl+r. Just press ctr+r and start typing part of the command. Then you press enter to execute or ctr+r to cycle through the history.
fish is nice but I've ran into too many issues where some weird shell command / script I find online is expecting to be in bash and I have to switch out of fish, so its hard for me to switch.
It works at least for nvm (caveat: Installed from nvm directly, not homebrew), and my company's ssh setup script, which are the two reasons I've had cause to use it.
It's worth getting used to your new discovery a bit first (C-r is isearch-backward), partly because it's useful in other places, too – for example ipython or any decent programming language shell has emacs-derived keybindings including isearch via readline or a clone.
However, I find that zsh + ohmyzsh works just as well. After typing the beginning of a command you can use the arrow keys to cycle through all commands in the history with the same beginning.
A third method for efficient history search is ctrl+r. Just press ctr+r and start typing part of the command. Then you press enter to execute or ctr+r to cycle through the history.