Comment by swyx
3 years ago
in 180 characters: https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1344127570753646593
A guide to the 3 dashes in English:
Hyphens (-) are compound-words.
En dashes (⌥ -) connect beginning–ending.
Em dashes (⌥⇧-) can replace parentheses and colons — use them more!
Or in Linux,
En dash (–): Compose - - .
Em dash (—): Compose - - -
https://tstarling.com/stuff/ComposeKeys.html
https://www.x.org/releases/current/doc/libX11/i18n/compose/e...
Also on Windows: http://wincompose.info/
Of the three major OSes, Linux has the most intuitive way of producing special characters with its compose keys
To my surprise, no spaces around mdash is the general recommendation.
Moving through text using Cmd + Left/Right arrow will jump over two words if there’s an em dash between them with no spaces. As a frequent em dash user that was very annoying, so I switched to adding spaces — to hell with the APA.
True; depends on the style guide, but most opt in that direction. The Chicago Manual of Style is very firmly in favor of it.
It's more a matter of continent than style (ie, the former can explain most of the variance).
The alternative is usually en-dash with spaces.
> ⌥⇧-
What is this
macOS shortcuts. Option-Shift-minus