"Change" as much whitespace as necessary

Question

I'm editing a table in extended-markdown, and I'm wondering how to easily edit cells without moving the dividing lines.

Tables are formatted like this:

| HEADING1         | HEADING2       | etc...
| ---------------- | -------------- | etc...
| row 1            | column2        | etc...
| etc...

Suppose I want to change an entry but leave the next | in its place. Ideally, I'd go to the first word in the cell and use c<something>, type the new entry, and, upon leaving insert mode, a sufficient number of spaces would be inserted or deleted after the new text to ensure that the | character is restored to its original location, if possible. (Obviously if too much text is entered, this won't be possible; one solution for this would be to somehow restrict the insert operation to the maximum number of characters to permit retaining the cell-shape, though I don't know if Vim permits this.)

This seems like it should be possible to implement by creating a new text-object or something, though I realize there would be a fair amount of "magic" involved since leaving insert mode would trigger a second edit operation.

Answer 1

Have you tried the R operator? This will let you overwrite whatever text you need to without moving the |. If your word is shorter than what you're replacing, you can simply fill the rest with spaces.

See :h R for more info.