Re: Adding refactoring capabilities to Emacs

[Eshel Yaron]

João Távora <joaotavora@gmail.com> writes:

>> > Also, it would be very good if we could have an early backend which is
>> > *not* LSP.  An obvious candidate is Elisp.
>>
>> FWIW, I think `sweeprolog`, my NonGNU ELPA package for SWI-Prolog can
>> also a good non-LSP backend.  Elisp would be perfect, no doubt.
>> But `sweeprolog` is interesting because it does a lot of code analysi
> [...]
>> insert a new name, and it renames the variable at once.  That's alright
>> for renaming local variables, but it would be great to simply plug in to
>> a generic refactoring UI.
>
> Great.  Precise project-wide analysis (as opposed to more-or-less dumb
> grep-based) is exactly the main thing we should be targeting IMO.
> Is "rename" the only thing it does or can you, say, extract subexpressions
> to variables, organize imports, etc?

Yes, there are some other things already in place, like updating imports
and adding exports.  I have a work-in-progress implementation for
extracting subexpressions (subterms, in Prolog), but nothing in terms of
existing commands.  A relevant feature that's already in place is
creating a definition for an undefined predicate at point.  Its relevant
because I had to consider where to put this new definition, which
applies also to extracting subexpressions.  Currently there's a user
option that controls where to put new definitions, by default it's right
below the predicate at point (the one that references the new predicate).