I'm unsure how to "sell" this idea. I don't want to force my view on others until I truly understand the problem that they're trying to solve with modules/microservices.

For searching multiple files, ripgrep works really well in neovim :)

[1] https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep

grep can search multiple files at once.

I actually use ripgrep.

But modules can be in different repositories I haven't cloned yet.

Just use a proper IDE. It doesn't care about how your code is structured and can easily show you what you look for in context.

(And other tools like symbol search https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/searching-everywhere.htm...)

and it also does not magically guess what is in modules you haven't fetched yet. (I use LSP when I can)

Of course it can't know about non-existent sources. But when the sources are there, it's light years ahead of a simple text search that is grep/ripgrep.

Repo search.

> With modules, I need to know where to search to begin with

You can just grep / search all the files.

> in which version.

grep / search doesn't search through time whether you're using one file or many modules. You probably want git bisect if you can't find where something is anymore (or 'git log' if you have good commit messages),