Recently Drupal uber-guru John VanDyk wrote a blog post about searching code with grep.  He has a great tip about creating a small bash script to use as a shortcut. 

As an alternative to grep you can use fgrep.  fgrep is the same as grep except that it doesn't support regex, hence it's much faster (hence the f).  98% of the time you don't need regex.  

fgrep is noticably faster, expecially when you are searching the entire codebase of a site that has many modules with many files (like CiviCRM or TinyMCE).