I have found a small useful software called "text crawler" which allow searching text string into multiple text file. So if you are looking for a variable in particular and actually have no idea in which file it is contained, you select elemental's XML directory, you type the string to search, click find and it will show all the files where the string appears and show you how many times it appeared with an example of string and the line number. From there you can select the files and edit it in an external editor like Notepad. You can also replace string across multiple files.
By the way, there is a neat text editor called "notepad++" which has programming language recognition and much more features like macros and advanced searches.
