this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2025
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Fuck AI
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Except most normal people use hyphens, and the only place I've seen dashes was in pieces of text that actually were supposed to be stylized 100% correctly - books, papers and the like. Not posts on internet forums.
I agree. On my normal keyboard I wouldn't even know how to produce an EM dash without looking it up. On my phone keyboard I can easily but that's just the intuitive UI.
I use hyphens all the time. I can't say I've noticed an EM dash outside a book, paper, or blog post (like, proper stylized blog).
It's easy on a Mac — option-shift-hyphen.
I can guarantee you that 99% of Mac users do not know about that.
Entirely possible, but then we're also talking in a thread about a subject that apparently 99% of humans don't know about either.
And easy on Linux
compose+---.But I'm the guy who types
CTRL+MAJ+u202fto have thin non-breaking spaces, so I'm not sure I'm representative.I mapped AltGr+Shift+Space to the thin non-breaking space, since it's the objectively best thousands separator. It's the norm in my country's locale (Czech) and understood everywhere (and I know you understand the decimal frustrations as a multilingual typist). Unless it's 4 digits or in ASCII-only contexts, in which case I don't use any.
I could have done.that, but the Unicode code works almost everywhere, so I just learnt it.
It's at the XKB level (
/usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/cz_mod) so it works in all applications. And when would you be typing fancily on someone else's Linux machine?I actually don't even have compose bound to a key because I simply never have to type anything that's not in the normal UTF-8 space on my PC lol
What is "the normal UTF-8 space"?
You would like unexpected keyboard for your phone then. It supports en–dashes, em—dashes and non-breaking spaces without needing a symbol layer.
Does it permit easily to switch dictionaries and layouts? I type regularly in three different languages on my phone, that's why I use AnySoftKeyboard.
layouts is easy, but I'm afraid it does not support dictionaries, so that might be a dealbreaker for you
Why be representative when you can be exceptional? :)
I use them all the time — unlike in the article I surround them with spaces though, so I guess at least that makes me human, even if wrong.
You space the endash, not the emdash.
I just switched to a keyboard that has both em- and endashes, so I am slightly irritated that using them would make my writing look like ai now