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I type Compose Hyphen Hyphen, which is pretty quick and easy!

(One might feel that normal keyboards don't have a compose key.)

> One might feel that normal keyboards don't have a compose key.

On the other hand, normal keyboard have an insert key which serves no purpose and can thus be remapped to compose.

I feel the same way about Caps Lock!

> Well the em dash remains difficult to type on a normal keyboard

Not on Mac:

hyphen/dash: -

En-dash: ⌥-

Em-dash: ⇧⌥-

thats a lot of effort :)

Something about people successful with computers makes them quick to claim something is easy based on the number of steps needed, without regard to the ease of remembering all the arbitrary or sometimes contra-pattern steps required.

In my defense, I remember it because I expect Option key to modify the original character and Shift key to make it bigger, so remembering that Option plus Shift makes hyphen into a bigger alternate version of it, i.e. the em dash, is not difficult. I acknowledge that not everyone would see it this way.

Obligatory https://xkcd.com/378/

Easy on windows: press and hold the alt key, and then 0151 on the numeric keypad.