I partially agree with you, but it's because I have a certain searching method that I'm comfortable with. I use sed/awk/grep quite a bit. The find command is also useful - but with those utilities, I can quickly search for any string or regular expression I need.

If I'm looking for the word cow in a doc that I think is in a folder (even if it's in subfolders), then I can do this:

grep --color=always -r "cow"

(I like setting color to always, and for some reason I'm too lazy to set up an alias so I don't have to type it)

I can get way more complicated by escaping spaces, looking for certain file types, etc.... really this does about the same as grep though - but still interesting:

find -name ".txt" -o -name ".md" -type f | sed 's/\ /\\\ /'g | xargs grep --color=always -n "cow"

Using these utilities, I've been able to find things in lots of lines of code, or lots of lines of md files.

You should take a look at rg and fd too to replace/augment grep and find!

Neat! Thanks for recommending those. I hadn't heard of either of those commands.

You need to learn about silversearcher/ag :)

Well, I do have around 8000 documents, and I organize them with a mix of hierarchy and tags (plus search). My entire site (taoofmac.com) was built that way, but the hierarchy was key - otherwise I would have trouble grouping and managing related things.