So your argument is that something might, in some extremely rare cases, go wrong, and that is why you'd rather do it the manual way? That's basically like a carpenter refusing to use power tools, because they might, theoretically, explode.

> Are you relying on a correct and comprehensive project/workspace setup within the IDE?

Of course. Not much point in using an IDE otherwise.

> Are you relying on a correct and comprehensive project/workspace setup within the IDE?

That's not something I "rely" on, it's the first thing I make happen whenever I use an IDE.

> What if the IDE did not traverse a specific file during the global search and replace?

You generally get compilation/build errors highlighting the bits that were missed (for whatever reason)

Then your tests catch it, and you have to fix a single file manually, instead of a dozen or a hundred or a thousand.

Sure, and that’s exactly the same failure mode as “sed”. What’s the benefit of the big IDE?

> What’s the benefit of the big IDE?

To quote myself, "fix a single file manually, instead of a dozen or a hundred or a thousand".

And what happens when you need to rename, say, a method name that's also used as a variable name in many places? xWhat happens if multiple classes define the same method name, but you only want to rename that method for a single class?

Yes, you can probably do it in sed. If you're used to it enough, you can probably do it pretty quick, with sufficient regexps that you only have to debug a few times.

Or you can right click or hit CMD-. or hit F2 or whatever with your cursor on a method name, type in the new name, wait 2 seconds, and you're done.