rector looks like an excellent tool for those days when you need to rewrite large chunks of legacy code for the modern coding standards and best practices. Of course, there are IDEs that can help a lot with refactoring, but they are usually complex and slow. Regular expressions have always been a poor man’s choice for replacing old code with new code. But life can be easier and better. rector helps you find and replace things like namespaces, class names, method names and property names; change type hints and values of parameters; replace magic methods with their real implementations, and much more.
I’m sure I’ll be trying it out Real Soon Now ™, with the upcoming release of CakePHP 3.6.