My lowtech solution was just a bunch of aliases for directories i use a lot. Like:

  alias .a='cd ~/src/autosqueezer'
  alias .g='cd ~/src/gcc-squeeze-plugin'
  alias .u='cd ~/src/squeeze-utils'

etc. You have to manage them by hand, but that's easy, and makes the result much more predictable than anything based on history.

I also have contextual companions to these, defined as functions, like:

  .r() {
    local project_root=$(somehow work out the root of the current project)
    cd $project_root
  }

  .b() {
    .r
    cd build
  }