I was responding specifically to the somewhat alarming claim that faith in the operation of one's IDE is a substitute for regularly running tests. I wasn't denying that automated refactoring tools are nice to have; they obviously are.
Regardless, I don't really think that the examples you give have much to do with the IDE vs (editor+plugins) debate; they're to do with the amenability of one's language to static analysis. Certainly code modification features are available to statically typed languages that aren't available to dynamically-typed ones (and this may explain why users of the latter are less drawn to IDEs), but there are compensatory benefits to using a dynamic language. Let's not get into that one, though, eh? One eternal flame-war per thread is probably sufficient. :-)
Regardless, I don't really think that the examples you give have much to do with the IDE vs (editor+plugins) debate; they're to do with the amenability of one's language to static analysis. Certainly code modification features are available to statically typed languages that aren't available to dynamically-typed ones (and this may explain why users of the latter are less drawn to IDEs), but there are compensatory benefits to using a dynamic language. Let's not get into that one, though, eh? One eternal flame-war per thread is probably sufficient. :-)