[jolmg]

> That only works if the identifier name is unique across your files

hence

> It's not precise, so it might take some manual work and tweaking with the patterns

and like I said,

> for how often I've had to rename identifiers, it works good enough to handle the bulk work.

so

> You need an editor that can understand

No I don't, because renaming across many files is rare enough that I don't need it.

Most of the time, I do refactoring before it's gotten out of hand and so regular vim features like I mentioned in another comment are typically enough.

In other words, I think such understanding by the editor is too much complexity (and language-constrained, at that) for little reward.