Yeah, there's one built into Vim!

    :bufdo %s/^R-w/new_name/gc

This is exactly the kind of action that leads to build breaks.

Don't do it, use a real IDE.

Unless you're using Smalltalk, then no, I'm not willing to use a watered down language for the simple ability to make variable renames bulletproof.

There are other dynamic languages besides smalltalk that have a good IDE. Jetbrains provides IDEs with refactoring support for JavaScript, python, ruby, php and others.

not bulletproof refactoring though.

Sorry but you are wrong. Every IDE I've seen is big, bloated and the useful features it provides are more cumbersome that sed, grep and find. OTOH vim is fast, universally available, and because of it's nature much faster to code in. I look at it this way: when you first switch to vim, you will be working WAY slower than in your favorite IDE. Take one hour to learn the basics. Then you will be just as fast. Then, anything new you learn is just going to give you that much more speed over your old way.

Also, in general, it doesn't matter what you program in: be it an IDE, vim, cat, or a magnetized needle. A good hacker finds a way to write good code.

If you are writing Java code in vim, I guarantee you that you will be faster and more productive with an IDE.

I can't believe you actually think that typing all these characters (imports, renaming by hand, creating methods by hand, etc..), navigating between classes, finding symbols is making you faster.

vim is great for general text editing, but for Java, nothing can beat an IDE. Try it, you'll be surprised.

Heh. True, I do most of my development in Python, PHP, JavaScript, and C. vim is all about saving you keystrokes though. NERDTree is for navigating files, and autocomplete plugins are abound.

Refactoring support has nothing to do with IDEs. Nothing.

An IDE is, well, an integrated development environment - I find the idea of mashing my editor, VCS, build system, debugger, etc. into one tool to be incredibly distasteful.

What you want is a competent editor. Unfortunately, most editors that provide support for things like automated refactoring are bundled into IDEs, hence your confusion.

> Refactoring support has nothing to do with IDEs. Nothing.

Uh?

The strength of an IDE is that it understands your code. It knows what a method, a class, a variable, a package is. Because of that, it can give you more assistance in writing your code than any editor that bases its highlighting on regular expressions ever will.