> Can you think in terms of what a JetBrains codebase will look like after you refactor it, without actually doing the refactoring and seeing the result? How about with two or three such applications in play? It gets pretty hard, no?
I don't know what kind of refactoring you are doing but for me yes I absolutely know what it will look like after the refactoring. In fact, that is usually why I'm doing it: refactoring to remove complication.
For example, the typical "extract method" refactoring lets me grab a piece of code that is almost duplicated elsewhere and turn it into a method with conditional logic to handle both conditions. That's a great simplification and make it much easier to hold in my head.
I don't know what kind of refactoring you are doing but for me yes I absolutely know what it will look like after the refactoring. In fact, that is usually why I'm doing it: refactoring to remove complication.
For example, the typical "extract method" refactoring lets me grab a piece of code that is almost duplicated elsewhere and turn it into a method with conditional logic to handle both conditions. That's a great simplification and make it much easier to hold in my head.