Re: Adding refactoring capabilities to Emacs

[Dmitry Gutov <dmitry@gutov.dev>]

On 19/08/2023 09:03, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>    But back-end is just one part of this.  We should IMO begin by our own
>    research into the UI parts of this: how does the user specify the
>    requested refactoring?  Several alternatives are possible, and we
>    should study them and decide what is best for Emacs.

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).

LSP clients, with their more sophisticated operations, could use the UI 
as well, as long as it's possible to agree on the input instructions format.

And there could be some language-specific refactorings implemented in 
Lisp as well.