Say I have the following line:
|add_test() (| == cursor position)
And want to replace the 'add' with a 'del'.
del|_test()
I can either press X three times and then press i to insert and type del. What I want is something like 3c or 3r to overwrite just 3 characters. Both of these don't do what I want, 3c overwrites 3 characters with the same character, 3r does several other things.
Is there an easy way to do this without manually Xing and inserting the text?
Answer
3s, "substitute 3 characters" is the same as c3l. 3cl and c3l should be the same, I don't know why you'd see the same character repeated. I'm also a fan of using t, e.g. ct_ as another poster mentioned, then I don't have to count characters and can just type "del".
I struggled with the "replace a couple of characters" for a few days too; 'r' was great for single characters, R was great for a string of matching length, but I wanted something like the OP is asking for. So, I typed :help x and read for a while, it turns out that the description of s and S are just a couple of pages down from x.
In other words, :help is your friend. Read and learn.