Yeah the problem with this approach to me is populating the history with a bunch of cd to absolute paths to begin with, which is not something I'd do natural (I have many ways I'm navigating the file system), and definitely wouldn't do manually. Not having to populate that list is the advantage of zoxide.
- Recursive directory tab completion isn't viable for many key use cases (it'll hang with both monorepos and networked volumes). The only thing that makes zoxide viable is that it only matches against visited directories. (Similarly fzf doesn't have much of a relation here besides encouraging recursive fuzzy matching, which I tend to avoid because it doesn't scale to complex directory structures.)
- Zoxide is probably sponsored by Warp, I doubt they have a relation beyond that, I'm not sure but they don't have much of a synergy beyond both being written in Rust. (The main point of relevance here is Warp is venture funded.)
- Zoxide having a database outside of the shell is actually a huge advantage to me, because it makes it easy to access your database outside of the shell (e.g., Zoxide integration in Vim).
I think that's ok if you have absolute paths mixed in.
If I have some long path like ~/src/open-source/dotfiles or /home/nick/src/open-source/dotfiles it all works with fuzzy matching. You can hit CTRL+r and then search for "cd dotfiles" and it finds it. The ~ isn't necessary, you can also do "^cd dotfiles"` for a tighter list of matches for paths that are more ambigious with other non-cd commands.