There are in fact some refactoring tools available for Python, but yeah, personally I have ag (find + grep like tool) installed with the ag and wgrep-ag Emacs p

There are in fact some refactoring tools available for Python, but yeah, personally I have ag (find + grep like tool) installed with the ag and wgrep-ag Emacs packages, and don't consider renaming a major hassle. There's a pyflake integration thing for Emacs too, where it underlines errors. One benefit of grep is that it lets me spot things in different languages (Python, Javascript, HTML, CSS, documentation).