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Comment by Hilift | Hacker News Reader

"Point to the keys you press to enter the em dash". And smart quotes. My conjecture (and personal experience) is 99% of the occurrences of these characters is not due to pressing they corresponding keys, it is due to copy paste. So it should not be surprising or considered to be a personal attack on AI.

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FYI on a Mac, option - is an en dash, shift option - is an em dash.

Smart quotes are trickier, because the shortcuts are unfortunately unintuitive IMO. I forget what the original ones are, but they involve the [ and ] keys. I've actually remapped them using Karabiner-Elements so that option [ and ] are single quotes and shift option [ and ] double quotes.

Apple botched the quotes by putting ‘’ on [ and “” on ], rather than the open quotes on the open bracket and the close quotes on the close bracket.

(Personally I put the open quotes on ` and the close quotes on ', along with using Apple-style dash layout.)

In most word processing software you just type "--", or "--- " to get an em-dash. It's not rocket science.

Apple users (both macOS and iOS) get curly quotes by default when they hit quote key.

They also get the em dash when typing '--'

Many devices and word processors will convert "--" into an em-dash. On longer posts, I often write in a word processor and then copy-paste to a text field.

On Android and iOS, you press and hold the "-" to get the "–" and "—" options.

On Mac, use opt + hyphen for "–" and opt + shift + hyphen for "—" (similar to other special characters).

On Linux you can enable the compose key and use it similar to MacOS (Compose+---).

It's not rocket science.

From `/usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose`:

    ...
    <Multi_key> <less> <apostrophe>     : "‘"   U2018 # LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
    <Multi_key> <apostrophe> <less>     : "‘"   U2018 # LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
    <Multi_key> <greater> <apostrophe>  : "’"   U2019 # RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
    <Multi_key> <apostrophe> <greater>  : "’"   U2019 # RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
    <Multi_key> <less> <quotedbl>       : "“"   U201c # LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
    <Multi_key> <quotedbl> <less>       : "“"   U201c # LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
    <Multi_key> <greater> <quotedbl>    : "”"   U201d # RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
    <Multi_key> <quotedbl> <greater>    : "”"   U201d # RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
    ...
    <Multi_key> <minus> <minus> <minus> : "—"   U2014 # EM DASH
    ...

I genuinely do not understand how compose-lacking ɪᴍᴇs continue to see use—so much more of the full unicode spec is trivially available to you… even quite intuitively.

All the best,

-HG

I set up espanso to replace -= with the em dash when I type because I like its aesthetic. I used to use the compose key, and on Windows I'd had an AHK shortcut for it. On Android GBoard has the em dash as an option which long pressing on the dash, while FUTO makes it available just from the letter g.

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