How to insert spaces up to column X to line up things in columns?

Question

I have my source code for copy operators written as follows.

foo = rhs.foo;
foobar = rhs.foobar;
bar = rhs.bar;
toto = rhs.toto;

I\'d like

Answer 1

An alternative solution is to perform two consecutive substitutions:

%s/=/     =/
%s/\%>7c *//

The trick is the column pattern \%>7c that matches white spaces * only after the 7th column. Here foobar is the longest variable name with 6 characters so we need 7 in the regex.