I Love Refactoring in Eclipse

The refactoring support in Eclipse has always amazed me.  Not only is there a refactoring for just about everything, many of the different Eclipse tools hook into the refactoring support. Frankly, I’ve come to take this all for granted.  That is, until earlier this week.

As part of our contribution of the Toast example code from the upcoming OSGi and Equinox book to the Eclipse Examples project, I had to rename the bundles and packages and extensions and DS components and… for 81 bundles and features.  Yikes! In the end it took me about 2 hours and both the client and the server just worked. What’s more, I did not change a single file in an editor by hand. Turning on all the replace options finds references in all files.

Old hat for many. Hidden power for some. For me, just using a tiny fraction of the time saved by the refactoring support to say Thanks to all the teams that contribute refactoring participants.