Comment by cwnyth
15 hours ago
Ex-academic here. I too use/tended to use em-dashes quite a bit. It's easy to compose in Linux (Gnome) with a real keyboard: Ctrl Shift U 2014 is ingrained in my head from using them all the time in my academic work.
15 hours ago
Ex-academic here. I too use/tended to use em-dashes quite a bit. It's easy to compose in Linux (Gnome) with a real keyboard: Ctrl Shift U 2014 is ingrained in my head from using them all the time in my academic work.
Are you familiar with the 'Compose' key/xcompose?
Indeed, the compose key is how I've always handled easy access to additional (proper? complete?) punctuation (and several other useful characters) capabilities on desktop Linux for many years now. I usually set the Caps-Lock key to my compose key because I literally never use Caps-Lock anyhow, so it's nice to turn it into a useful key. :)
As an em-dash abuser I have decided that it is a crutch to not think through what I am saying--I can lazily connect a stream of thoughts rather than think clearly and explicitly form sentence transitions and so on