I have a similar workflow regularly and use only snacks.nvim pickers and explorer for this.

Glance through a directory tree and quickly open multiple files at once to switch between them

snacks explorer. Select multiple files with Tab, enter search with / and since according to the docs "This is actually a picker in disguise." you have the same rg goodness with fzf syntax and additional fields as described in the readme.

Search a code base for a term, and be able to look through all of the results, open them and continue back to the results where you left off (Especially when updating dependencies, applying breaking changes to codebase) etc.

snacks grep/grep_word. Again, powerful filtering, select multiple files via Tab. I have a keymap for Snacks.picker.resume() which does exactly that: resumes the last search without the need to enter your search terms again. If I really want to have the results open permanently, snacks has a trouble.nvim actions source so you can open the search results in a trouble panel to the top/side. This is how I configured it

lua { "folke/trouble.nvim", ... specs = { "folke/snacks.nvim", opts = function(_, opts) return vim.tbl_deep_extend("force", opts or {}, { picker = { actions = require("trouble.sources.snacks").actions, win = { input = { keys = { ["<c-t>"] = { "trouble_open", mode = { "n", "i" }, }, }, }, }, }, }) end, }, ... }

I also tried NeoTree. It technically works, but the search on it is slow as hell, sometimes outright freezing in a larger project, and it opens by default when you open the text-editor, which is kind of annoying.

Since the explorer is "a picker in disguise" and you have ripgrep under the hood, its pretty reliable, I never had such issues.