Say you want to change some method’s name. But the method is very often referenced. So unless you have a nice refactoring tool you have to find all that references and change them manually. You’ll soon think that’s the sort of task computers were made for..Eclipse for example can do this for you. You only have to right click the method’s name and choose “change name”. I’ve searched for something similar for Microsoft’s Visual Studio C++ some time ago. I only found expensive commercial plugins which I didn’t like much. But today I stumbled across Refactor! for C++ which is free and looks very nice..

Edit:

Well, I’m sorry. I’m quite disappointed by this tool. “Extract Method” works very well. But that’s it. “Rename” only works within a method. You cannot rename a class and if you try to rename a class’ member no reference to that member is updated. So it’s useless.. The reason might be that the references are in the .cpp file but I’m starting the refactoring while editing the .h file. Perhaps the real features are limited to the commercial pro version..