Earlier quoted context omitted.
I actually used to use the single 's' keypress a lot. But at the same time I wasn't happy about that habit, it was often lazy-thinking, instead of using things like cf{char} or even cw, ce. So I committed to use '1s' when I really needed the single substitution, and it worked really well, so I felt I had gained on both sides. Just try and see what you think, you can always remove. And yes I will make it customizable,…
As a little thought exercise, I'm trying to see how many commands I can think of that are equivalent to s. So far: 1s cl c vc xi There's obviously more if you want to add '1' to a couple of these, and more still if you want to go to 3 characters.
Never knew about c (and d and y), I think it would be the easiest. Though I'm happy with 1s and now that I think about it, these {operator} beg to be remapped to something else entirely, maybe inner word or the function's name? I'll play around with onoremap iw