Refactoring in Vim

Question

Of course the fact that you can refactor on IDEs is priceless for many, I hardly ever do it when I am coding but I may try to do it when editing some one else\'s source. How do

Answer 1

Language Server Protocol (LSP)

The Language server protocol contains the feature for smart renaming of symbols across a project:

https://microsoft.github.io//language-server-protocol/specifications/specification-3-14/#textDocument_rename

For example following language server support this:

• Clangd for C++
• ccls for C/C++/Objective-C
• Eclipse.jdt.ls for Java
• pyls (with rope) for Python
• tsserver for TypeScript
• Solargraph for Ruby
• gopls official lsp for Go (alpha stage in Nov 2019)
• texlab for LaTeX

You can find more language servers under https://langserver.org/.

Vim

A vim editor client is necessary to use them within vim. Following options exist:

1. LanguageClient-neovim (requires rust) suggests the mapping:

    nnoremap   :call LanguageClient_textDocument_rename()
   

2. coc.nvim (requires node.js) suggests the mapping:

    " Remap for rename current word
    nmap rn (coc-rename)
   

3. Ale has

    nnoremap  (ale_rename) :ALERename
   

   Ale does not define any keybindings. This has to be done by the user.

4. vim-lsp provides following command

    :LspRename
   

   Similar to Ale no mapping is suggested. However, of course you can define one as following

    nmap r (lsp-rename)
   

   (r is to be replaced by your choice; I do not know one which most plugins agree on)

5. vim-lsc has a default mapping:

    'Rename': 'gR'
   

See also YouCompleteMe which facilitates LSPs as well.

Neovim

Neovim has initial builtin support for lsp since 13.11.2019

See for common configurations of LSPs https://github.com/neovim/nvim-lsp

However, I could not figure out how smart renaming works. If someone knows this, please update this section.

Other Refactorings

I do not know if there are plans for the LSP protocol to support more complex refactorings, such as changing class structure, adding parameters to methods/functions or moving a method to a different class. For a list of refactorings see https://refactoring.com/catalog/.