I speak as I think and I type and as I speak, so I do uses em-dashes. It’s a shame that it’s now a brand of low quality AI-generated content.
I'm sorry to break it to you but the sentence you just wrote doesn't contain any —s.
That’s true in the US layout, but on other layouts those can be reversed.
> for example in this HN edit box: - – —
They look the same in the HN edit box because the font is monospaced, but once posted they do look different.
Except you don’t. If you’re on an Apple OS, by default doing -- (two hyphens) auto-substitutes for an em-dash.
Also, the key combination isn’t even hard. Depending on the layout you’re using, it’s either ⌥- or ⌥⇧-. My fingers press that (and the appropriate combination for apostrophes too) without me having to think. Those ⌥ and ⇧ symbols (and many more) I have mapped to text snippets.
We’re using computers, these things are trivial to do and customise, you don’t have to “hunt” for anything.
I suspect it is more common to see in papers as you can type it with just "--" in LaTeX.
It's basically an extension of US International which can type every letter in all the Latin based alphabets and most of the common punctuations, including hyphens, hyphen-minuses, en-dashes, and em-dashed.
Never found room for all the Greek letters, though.
I have used emdash, typed this way for many years before LLMs. I had got the habit from mimicking my journalist father's writing style.
The Compose key is useful for many other symbols «×»÷₁²♥⋄•
Why should I waste time reading this link, when the "author" themselves didn't write and, probably not even read it themselves.