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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: 2.098s | 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. JimDabell ◴[28 Mar 25 05:55 UTC] No.43501982[source]▶
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.