I do that when I know just what I'm searching for, but for this sort of meandering around, I prefer to explore a file in Emacs. I can quickly get a list of everything that matches a certain regex and hop between the locations etc. It's much easier and faster (for me—a lot of this is just whatever one's used to). You're right that for a much larger repo, waiting for a file to dump, not to mention Emacs to open it, would make this impratical.