alt Hacker NewsWow thanks for the enlightenment. I dug into this a bit and found out:
Hyphen (-) — the one on your keyboard. For compound words like “well-known.”
En dash (–) — medium length, for ranges like 2020–2024. Mac: Option + hyphen. Windows: Alt + 0150.
Em dash (—) — the long one, for breaks in thought. Mac: Option + Shift + hyphen. Windows: Alt + 0151.
And now I also understand why having plenty of actual em-dashes (not double hyphens) is an “AI tell”.
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And Em Dash is trivially easy on iOS — you simply hold press on the regular dash button - I’ve been using it for years and am not stopping because people might suddenly accuse me of being an AI.
Thanks for that. I had no idea either. I'm genuinely surprised Windows buries such a crucial thing like this. Or why they even bothered adding it in the first place when it's so complicated.
If you have the compose key enabled it's trivial to write all sorts of things. Em dash is compose (right alt for me) ---
En dash is compose --.
You can type other fun things like section symbol (compose So) and fractions like ⅐ with compose 17, degree symbol (compose oo) etc.
https://itsfoss.com/compose-key-gnome-linux/
On phones you merely long press hyphen to get the longer dash options.