Not the parent commenter, but I also tried it a year or two ago and my recollection is that I had a similar experience. I have a really long history file that dates back like a decade and if remembering correctly I tried to import it, and it made using my shell very laggy so I ended up removing it. I'm not 100% positive that I'm remembering the exact way that I started experiencing the lag though, so if I have time tomorrow I'll try it out again and see if it's still something I encounter.
I think it was a combo of this + completely screwing my muscle memory haha. I'd give it another shot...but tbh, these days claude/codex are more my command line than bash/zsh.
I'm running into this again now that I'm trying it. I also have the unfortunate habit of sometimes trying to do stuff in the terminal via remote connection over a streaming server from my SteamOS handheld, and in the desktop input layout I have defined, I can really easily hit the up arrow with my thumbstick, whereas any modifier shortcuts need to be defined manually. From glancing through the config file, there does seem to be a lot of customization though, so I think it might still be viable if I can find a sweet spot in how to define the settings.
I'm curious, is using the daemon with my own frontend a supported use case? Because I had a thought...while as I mentioned above I don't use the CLI much anymore...my agents do, and having that history in a sql db would be mighty useful...
Edit: Okay, y'all are literally working on exactly what I need to build off of, perfect lmao
