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

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650 points Stratoscope | 6 comments | 27 Mar 25 20:19 UTC | HN request time: 0.862s | source | bottom
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A_D_E_P_T ◴[27 Mar 25 20:41 UTC] No.43497927[source]▶
AFAIK most computer keyboards don't have em dashes. Rather than hit ALT+0151 every time, I've always just strung along two hyphens, like: --

Absolutely proper and correct use of em dashes, en dashes, and hyphens is, to me, the most obvious tell of the LLM writer. In fact, I think that you can use it to date internet writing in general. For it seems to me that real em dashes were uncommon pre-2022.

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thesauri ◴[27 Mar 25 20:45 UTC] No.43497959[source]▶
On Macs:

Hyphen -: -

En Dash –: alt -

Em Dash —: alt shift -

replies(1): >>43498029 #
alabastervlog ◴[27 Mar 25 20:51 UTC] No.43498029[source]▶
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.
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1. agys ◴[27 Mar 25 21:23 UTC] No.43498350[source]▶
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.

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2. alabastervlog ◴[27 Mar 25 21:31 UTC] No.43498426[source]▶
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.

replies(1): >>43498505 #
3. agys ◴[27 Mar 25 21:40 UTC] No.43498505[source]▶
Ah! © is on C (makes sense!)
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4. Eric_WVGG ◴[27 Mar 25 21:48 UTC] No.43498574[source]▶
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 √

5. jbverschoor ◴[27 Mar 25 22:04 UTC] No.43498709[source]▶
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)

6. alabastervlog ◴[27 Mar 25 23:35 UTC] No.43499515{3}[source]▶
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.