How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)

The default US English Mac keyboard is so extremely good, and has been the way it is for so long, that I remain baffled that other platforms haven't simply copied it. I came to it relatively late in life and it's one of the reasons I wish I'd started using Macs sooner.

This specific key combination is not US keyboard specific. I like how they managed to group characters that are formally similar by binding them to the same keys.

Examples:

en and em are on -

Below are maybe Swiss specific?

~ is on N

@ is on G

| and \ and / are on 7

√ is on V

¥ is on Y and € is on E

∑ on W ( ∑ is a rotated W :)

etc.

Yeah, mostly the same on my US keyboard, except a couple like "@" (that's shift-2 on basically all US keyboards, and is printed on the key) and |/\, which are more prominent on US keyboards (two simply have their own keys, no shift modifier, even). I get the © symbol for option+g (which still kind-of makes sense!)

I appreciate that the designer of the layout clearly attempted to make some kind of mnemonic connection to the degree they could. Makes it easier to discover and remember the key-combos, even without a cheat sheet.

Ah! © is on C (makes sense!)

It's pretty decent but the fact that I can't type an arbitrary unicode character has been a huge annoyance of mine since I switched from Windows/WSL to Mac.

They have shortcuts for Í, Î, and Ï but not for many commonly used characters like arrows

my favorite example of this is ellipsis … opt-; (the key with the colon over the semicolon is sort of a rotated ellipsis)

thank you for teaching me √

Except for international where € is opt-shift-2 (next to the pound/hash), next the to dollar

modifiers:

opt-e+letter é (acute/aigu)

opt-`+letter è (grave)

opt-i+letter û (circumflex)

opt-u+letter ü (umlaut)

opt-n+letter ñ (for the mañana)

Control+Command+Space or Fn+E or Edit > Emoji & Symbols if you know the character’s name. It’s not very convenient for repeated use, but it gets the job done in a pinch.

That's c-cedille here, because to write English fluently you need to be able to type French loan words like façade—but not quite so often as someone in Switzerland, probably (especially so in some parts of the country!) so I assume you've got it somewhere even more prominent on your keyboard.

You can add the "Unicode Hex Input" keyboard layout, which lets you enter BMP characters by holding down Option and entering its code point in hex (similar to the hex entry on Windows). Expanding the Emoji & Symbols pane minitech mentioned also lets you browse by category (e.g. arrows), and you can customise the categories and add a full Unicode character picker (not limited to BMP like the Windows Character Map) there as well.

Aside from the solutions other people have mentioned, if you have often-used symbols, you can set up a text replacement in keyboard settings. For instance, I have :x: for the multiplication sign.

Yeah it's not great. Edit isn't always there. Fn+E seems to make the most sense. I've heard about ctrl+cmd+space but commonly forget it. Both of those open the same GUI which combines emojis, stickers, and unicode symbols—preferring the first two categories over the last. To type out a unicode symbol it takes at least three clicks on top of me starting to type in the name of my symbol

sigh

Thanks for the suggestions

It's very easy¹ on MacOS to make yourself a custom layout with the characters you commonly use. Personally, I put arrows on ⌥⇧HJKL, vi-style.² (Doing so for Linux is a little more work, as xkb is more complicated and less capable.)

¹ https://software.sil.org/ukelele/

² https://codeberg.org/datatravelandexperiments/kps-keyboard-l...

> Edit isn't always there. Fn+E seems to make the most sense. I've heard about ctrl+cmd+space but commonly forget it.

You can remap Fn/Globe directly to it if you want. It's also accessible from the Input menu bar item if you show that.

> Both of those open the same GUI which combines emojis, stickers, and unicode symbols—preferring the first two categories over the last. To type out a unicode symbol it takes at least three clicks on top of me starting to type in the name of my symbol

Are you using the expanded Character Viewer window[0], or the default collapsed Emoji & Symbols pane[1]? Because the expanded Character Viewer lets you customise and reorder the categories[2] (though that doesn't affect search), including adding a full Unicode view[3]. And they both default to the search bar when opened (though the Character Viewer opens unfocused for some reason).

[0]: https://imgur.com/hTtrbcA

[1]: https://imgur.com/3L31DQu

[2]: https://imgur.com/Ch1PI5L

[3]: https://imgur.com/epayzwe