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Comment by rplnt | Hacker News Reader

I've only ever been using "regular" dash, a minus, for that. How do you even type yours? If I ever needed differently-sized dashes (and I don't know the difference between them) I always used wiki to copy them.

(disclaimer: I feel like this obsession with dashes is special to native English speakers, which I'm obviously not)

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silly specific: the minus sign is a separate character. The dash equivalent is the en dash (–), versus the larger em (—) and smaller hyphen (-).

The en dash is also used in things like scores (3–2 Turkey), votes (the bill passed 58–42), or connecting words where the second part is longer than one word (the Australia–New Zealand alliance.) You can remember the latter as, "a hyphen isn't big and strong enough to hold on to more than one word.

If you're on a mac, pressing Option+- is the en dash and Option+Shift+- is the em dash.

My first language is Dutch (Flemish). I didn’t even know there were three different dashes. The em dash is something I didn’t know exist, or were used, until llms came about. The hyphen is something we use when we make a list, that’s just the minus symbol right?

So em dashes are for pauses or highlighting things I guess? The en dash you explained in your reaction. Is there any other use for the hyphen except for making lists?

There aren't three different dashes. Unicode 15.0, table 6-3 (Unicode Dash Characters) lists 25 different dashes. https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode15.0.0/ch06.pdf#G612...

Only a small subset of native english speakers. Most don't use dashes at all, of those that do most just use minus for everything, some exceedingly small group cares about typographical details and thus distinguishes the different sorts of dashes.

It's an attention to detail thing that you'd definitely want to get right in a physical textbook or the like.

That's the same in my native language too I guess. It's used in books, sometimes in media, but not really in any casual setting I would say.

Depends on your OS. Mac is the easiest, it's just ---, Linux depends on your distro, if it uses KDE, it's <right-win>--- —. Windows is a little awkward, I think you need <right win>+the code point.

I have mac, typed this --- again --- and nothing? Layout says U.S.

edit: another comment gave a mac shortcut – — - <--- one of these might be it

Option-Shift-Hyphen.

It’s an obsession with literature and/or typography nerds specifically.

Option-shift-hyphen types an em-dash, option-hyphen an en-dash. You can also hold the hyphen key (on a Mac or iPhone) and it will allow you to select either. Em dashes are used—like—this—as something spiritually akin to a parenthetical. En-dashes are used within ranges: Feb 14–17.

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