I'm going to be a tad pedantic and note the following:
- bash and make are completely separate programs. As a matter of fact, I spend half of my time developing with ksh and Solaris make. The two programs you mention don't go 'hand in hand'.
- `find | xargs grep` is a terrible construct. 99% of the time (if not a lot more) you'd prefer using something like `find -exec`, I have yet to come across a version of `find` that wouldn't work that way.
My point is not to be an arrogant prick, and criticize the parent post. These kind of misconceptions usually indicate poor understanding of the larger Unix philosophy. By her own admission, my parent "just do[es]n't know enough".
I believe that in order to truly use Unix as an IDE, one has to go beyond the (arguably bad) reflexes taught by common GUI IDEs. It's not simply a matter of "What command can replace feature X from Netbeans/Eclipse/Visual Studio/...?" Modern IDEs weren't conceived with sed/awk in mind, aren't (for the most part) scriptable like most Unix shells are, and aren't sitting on top of a freaking Lisp machine like emacs is (you know the whole enlightment deal, lisp is superior, bla bla bla).
I am sounding like an evangelist, Unix tend to do that to me. I am trying to make a simple point:
It's normal to feel that something is missing if one is simply transposing her knowledge from point-and-click IDEs to the Unix shell.
(To answer your question, a combination of sed and awk does wonder to rename across the code base. And SO much more ...)