Comment by majormajor

5 months ago

There's an easy keyboard shortcut for it on Macs. I always saw it as a signifier of "Mac user with enough interest in writing style to use em-dashes instead of parentheses."

But I'm not on a Mac right now so I don't know how to even make a real one at the moment other than that LaTeX method.

15 comments

majormajor

Reply
machinate  5 months ago

Easy is almost an understatement; it's Alt+Hyphen. [Edit: My bad that's en-dash, can't tell the difference in this monospaced text field. Em-dash you have to hold shift.]

I guess on Windows it's Alt+0,1,5,1 on a numpad. Or you copy+paste from Character Map.

  • e28eta  5 months ago

    To be pedantic: Opt-shift-hyphen for the em dash (longer one). Opt-hyphen only gets you an en dash.

    • 9dev  5 months ago

      …which is the appropriate character for ranges, i.e., page 1–2.

      I find it a bit sad that using proper typography is now frowned upon, but it seems that ship has sailed.

      4 replies →

    • saagarjha  5 months ago

      One of the reasons I'm not on that page–I have a policy of using en dashes because I am lazy

  • SAI_Peregrinus  5 months ago

    Or you've had WinCompose installed for years and type Compose+hyphen+hyphen+hyphen. — is easy to type that way. The same works for Linux with a compose key enabled, WinCompose is a program to give Windows a compose key, and comes with default sequences including those found by default in most distro's XCompose list.

    • etra0  5 months ago

      Big shout-out to WinCompose, it's the only way I found my keyboard usable while being bilingual :)

Freak_NL  5 months ago

Not just Apple users. The compose-key does this on a variety of desktop operating systems, where the shortcut is COMPOSE - - - for em-dash, and - - . for en-dash.