[sfink]

That sounds promising. You understood perfectly where I am and what I'm looking for, thanks.

I'll check out ag.el. The incremental search is not that big a deal, I'm usually searching for a keyword anyway.

I looked briefly at org-roam, and I agree with your assessment. It looks like it adds friction to the part that needs to be as smooth as possible for me: adding notes. I could probably dummy something up for searching by making a command that shells out to grep or whatever, but that feels like fighting against the data model.