Comment by userbinator
5 months ago
I suspect they are generated via "autocorrect", the same way as "smart (more like stupid) quotes" and other characters that tend to cause a great deal of frustration should they find their way into source code. It would be interesting to see how many users regularly make posts containing non-ASCII characters.
I type them manually out of habit. There are a handful of other common non-ASCII marks I have muscle memory for as well.
Compose-minus-minus-minus in X
It's one of the long-press punctuation marks on Android
Option-shift-minus on Mac
I use Autokey. I've added a bunch of occasionally-used HTML entities and Unicode characters so I don't need to go hunting for them.
I'm only #2 but all mine are guaranteed hand-made, done this way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45071823
When the pre 2022 versus post 2022 stats come out, all will be revealed.
No, I modified my keymap to make typing quotes and dashes and other characters easy.