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

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650 points Stratoscope | 1 comments | 27 Mar 25 20:19 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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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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culi ◴[27 Mar 25 21:47 UTC] No.43498559[source]▶
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

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1. Aaron2222 ◴[28 Mar 25 04:12 UTC] No.43501451[source]▶
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.