Replace colon with tab to make columns

I have word lists where the word or expression in Spanish is separated by its translation with a colon (":"). I want to make two columns, one for Spanish, the other for English. In vim I tried with

:%s/:/^I^I^I/g

But it does not give the desired output. The different columns are not aligned.

When deleting the colon by开发者_JAVA百科 hand and inserting the number of tabs with the same amount of tab strokes, it always ends up aligned.

Any idea how to solve this, preferably in vim?

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On a Linux/*nix system I use column(1)

:%!column -s':' -t 

followed by

:%retab!

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I'd probable do a

:s/:/^I/g

followed by a

:set ts=25

Where 25 is the length of the longest word expected + 2. So, if you expect the longest word of your input (on the left side of the colon) to be 12 characters, I'd choose something around 14 instead.

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With Tabular.vim it's quite easy, just type :Tab /:\zs and it does the rest.

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When in insert mode a setting of yours makes tab to reach a n^th column. This is set with the 'softtabstop' settings if I am right.

For those tasks you could use a plugin like Align.vim or Tabularize.

Another option is to insert a huge number of spaces, and then use Visual Block with < operator as many times as necessary, if you have to do it once. Otherwise prefer reusable methods.