Comment by yakshaving_jgt

You believing that renaming a file is difficult in Vim shows that you don’t know Vim as well as you think you do.

Here, I’ll do it completely from memory for you, while typing on my iPhone.

    :saveas newfile.ext<cr><c-^>:!rm %<cr><cr>:bd<cr>

And of course, you could always use the command line to rename anything.