How Unreal struggles with with renaming stuff (and how to fix it)

Normally, if a developer complains that “naming stuff is hard,” they are talking about the difficulty of finding a good name that is descriptive, clear, and unambiguous. But sometimes, developers struggle not only with finding a good name, but with the actual process of getting their new name into their workspace. For me specifically, it was Unreal that was persistently throwing me new issues and blockers when I needed to rename widgets and assets. That’s when I finally decided that enough was enough. Let’s write some fixes!(Note: I linked all my pull requests throughout the article. To actually open them you need to make sure that your Unreal account is linked to your GitHub account and you are logged in. You can find more information in the official documentation) Issue 1: When Unreal refuses to rename stuff The first one is one of those small, little annoyances that is easy to work around, but keeps popping up every so often that, at some point, you start to feel like the program…