How to recall a previous command (without execution) in order to change it?

!1255:p

Will do this

! is history recall
1255 is the line number
:p prints but does not execute

Then you can use up-arrow to get ther previous (unexecuted) command back and you can change it as you need.

I often combine this with hg ("History Grep") - my favorite alias.

$ alias hg  # Maybe use hgr instead if you are a Mercurial CLI user.
alias hg='history | tail -200 | grep -i'

This searches for text on a recent history line, regardless of case and is used this way:

When I want to search for recent vi commands to edit a certain file and then I want to re-use one of them to edit the same file but with a different file extension.

$ hg variables
 6153  vi Variables/user-extensions.js 
 6176  vi Variables/user-extensions.js 
 6178  vi Variables/user-extensions.js 
 6190  vi Variables/user-extensions.js 
 6230  hg variables
$ # Notice the difference in case with V and v is ignored
$ !6190:p
vi Variables/user-extensions.js 
$ ["up-arrow"]
$ vi Variables/user-extensions.[now change .js to .html]

I also define hga ("History Grep All") to search my entire history:

$ alias hga
alias hga='history | grep -i'

but I don't use it much because my history is (intentionally) very large and I get too much output that later affects scrolling back thru pages in my terminal.