That is my biggest problem with vim/emacs - they can edit the code well, but they have no real notion of syntax. You can do refactoring based on their lexers and a lot of regex, but it's just not what you really want.

I would really like to see Yi step up at some point and solve the problem here. It's already got proper incremental parsing with a proper syntax tree. When people add advanced language-specific modes to it, it might be the first "proper" refactoring vim/emacs like text-only IDE.