It’s not common to need to type 39 space characters in a row, but when the moment arises, you don’t want to be caught hitting the space bar 39 times. Vim makes it easy. From normal mode, type the number, then i, and then the character to be repeated followed by an escape.

For instance, for 39 spaces, hit:

39i <esc>

or for 80 dashes, hit:

80i-<esc>