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

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.

On Macs:

Hyphen -: -

En Dash –: alt -

Em Dash —: alt shift -

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!)