I’ve just found out about rope, a refactoring library for Python, and ropemacs, an Emacs frontend for it (built with pymacs). I’m looking forward to using it for work.

Setting it up was a snap:

1. download Pymacs, then python setup.py install
2. download rope, then python setup.py install
3. download ropemacs, then python setup.py install
4. Ensure pymacs.el is in your Emacs load-path.

5. Add the following to .emacs:

   (require 'pymacs)
   (pymacs-load "ropemacs" "rope-")
   

You should be good to go at at this point.