Re: Adding refactoring capabilities to Emacs

[Dmitry Gutov <dmitry@gutov.dev>]

On 20/08/2023 11:44, Yuri Khan wrote:
> On Sun, 20 Aug 2023 at 08:20, Dmitry Gutov<dmitry@gutov.dev>  wrote:
> 
>> If we had a better UI for renaming than query-replace, we could plug it
>> into project-find-regexp and xref-find-references' output buffers.
>>
>> Where you currently can hit 'r' to switch to renaming action, it could
>> instead show the proposed operation (in some fashion) and how the text
>> will look "after". That would cover the regexp-replace and the
>> rename-symbol refactorings. Just the basics, but still. Those could also
>> be combined into separate commands (such as
>> xref-find-references-and-replace).
> Renaming is already possible in Eglot, with the following UI: You
> stand on a symbol and invoke eglot-rename. It asks you for the new
> name, then does the right thing.

Indeed: we do have access to a bunch of refactorings already through 
Eglot. Some general, and some language-specific ones.

What we don't have is any advanced UI coming with that. Traditional IDEs 
(and apparently even VS Code now: 
https://bobbyhadz.com/images/blog/rename-variable-vscode/refactor-preview.webp) 
have been featuring the "preview changes" feature for years. One where 
you could see which files will be affected, and even opt out from some 
of the changes.

It seems like the LSP protocol provides enough information for this to 
work (the response to the "rename" action is a list of changes to be 
performed on the client), so the UI can definitely be extended there.