← Back to context

Comment by OskarS

4 years ago

Overly aggresive is right! I don't know if this is genius or deranged! I'm leaning towards genius and stealing the idea.

By the way: what's your beef with en dashes? I mean, if it was "everything should be 'HYPHEN-MINUS' (U+002D)", then fine, but why specifically en dashes and not em dashes?

> By the way: what's your beef with en dashes?

Of all the changes in that list, removing the character that doesn't appear on a standard keyboard seems like the least controversial...

  • To add, it's a character that gets magically inserted for no reason in various situations.

    It's up there with those damn angled quotes.

  • A better question might be "how did it get there in the first place?"

    • Presume all inputs are hostile.

      Whether people or processes, something is likely to introduce the character at some point.

    • Sw which converts -- and __ on the fly. Same sw converts quote pairs "for your convenience"

I totally agree that for some people, this could be a terrible command to have around. However, I know that it has been working for me for about 8+ years or so. I almost always run in in my ~/Downloads folder on files that I don't really care about. I download a lot of academic papers and books, and this just saves me a lot of time to put files in the format I like: author--paper-title.pdf. And that's part of the reason why I make all of the dashes the same, so if I'm opening something by an author, I can easily autocomplete and not have to remember how to make other sorts of dashes on the command line.

  • For a download folder in particular, this does sound like a great idea. You'd break the list in the browser or whatever, but who cares about that?