Throughout the day I’ll often find myself deleting a single character and putting a different one in its place. I usually navigate over the target character and hit s which removes the character under the cursor and puts me in insert mode. From there I type the new character and hit escape to return to normal node. This isn’t the best way to perform such an edit though. Vim has a command specifically for replacing a character. The r command. It does essentially the same thing as my current approach but instead of putting me in insert mode, it simply replaces the character and leaves me in normal node.

See :h r for more details.