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Comment by ButlerianJihad | Hacker News Reader

Okay, edit submitted, but that is extra weird, because the double hyphen is a convention or placeholder for an emdash. When a transformation takes place, it becomes an emdash.

There is no reason to transform it to an endash. I don't know any software that would do that. Checked with an LLM, too. That makes no sense at all!

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TeX uses -- (double hyphen) for producing an en dash and --- (triple hyphen) for an em dash, and that's pretty darn longstanding and well-established. And FWIW, the English writing conventions that I learned use em dashes as punctuation without an adjoining space—like this—but allow en dashes surrounded by spaces as an alternative – like this – so I frequently see spaced double hyphen used as the ASCII equivalent of dash punctuation and interpret it as the latter. I've never personally heard of double hyphen for em specifically, only either as en specifically or as a sort of ambiguous whatever-dash.

Double dash -> emdash is a default autoreplacement in OSX. That's why a lot of people think it's the default everywhere.

LibreOffice is the same, double hyphen is en-dash and to get an em-dash you have to type:

  :---:

I thought this was part of why it became an LLM signifier, most people can't tell the difference between the two visually and as far as I knew en-dash is what you usually get by accident, while LLMs use em-dash.

Then how do you type in an en dash instead? Also, according to LLMs, the en dash is used in far more languages than the em dash. Many languages don't use the em dash at all. Using the em dash for sentence interruptions seems to be specifically an US American English tradition: Most languages which use dashes for sentence interruptions use spaced en dashes instead.

I get en dash with alt+- and em dash with alt+shift+-. One of the niceties of the macOS keyboard layouts. There’s also the ellipsis and middot among other things.

> how do you type in an en dash instead?

By pressing the "-" key for half a second and choosing the exact dash character I am looking for in the pop-up that shows near the caret.

KDE Plasma: Press-and-Hold for Alternative Characters https://blogs.kde.org/2026/03/14/this-week-in-plasma-press-a...

because the double hyphen is a convention or placeholder for an emdash

A /more recent/ convention.

My memory of early Associated Press computer systems is that two dashes is the endash (or "nutt") and three dashes is the emdash ("mutt").

On Linux, the en dash is typed with `[Compose]--.` and the em dash with `[Compose]---`.

Unless, you know, you configured it to work differently. I'm using [Compose]nd and [Compose]md . And a bunch of other cute things, like [Compose][Compose] for escape (with Caps Lock as my compose key).

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