Can you point me to docs on in file searching? Those symbols are predictably hard to google. Based on a little messing around, it appears that * is what I expect from bash, and can also include directory separators.

Google is not the right place to search for help: Vim comes with an extensive and easily searchable documentation.

    :h **

is all you need to get your answer.

Google helps when you don't exactly know what's the name of the thing you're looking for. That's in my case 85% of all searches.

You could try :helpgrep foo next time.

Wow. I did not think vim help would deal with symbols well, either. Thanks!

    :h starstar

roughly means the same thing as -r or -R.