> I don't get this. Most of the known refactorings can't be easily implemented by IDEs so you're left with the trivial ones like renaming or moving things. The

> I don't get this. Most of the known refactorings can't be easily implemented by IDEs so you're left with the trivial ones like renaming or moving things. These alone are already huge. Think about it for a while, keeping a code base healthy as it goes through evolutions involves a lot of renaming and moving things around. But there are so many more refactorings that are tedious or even dangerous to do manually. For example, switching the parameters of a method, lifting a method in a base class, extracting an interface out of a class and using that interface everywhere in your code base instead of the concrete class, etc... Spend some time reading the extremely long list of refactorings offered by IDEA and Eclipse, it will open your eyes.