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topgrain2yesterday at 6:27 PM2 repliesview on HN

Keyboard layout specific. Macs with their default English layout use “option-shift-dash” which is really easy to remember (and relatively discoverable, as such things go) which is why using proper m-dashes (not just double-dashes) used to be a strong indicator a poster was using a Mac, before LLMs took the character over.

On iOS you type it by pressing dash and holding until alternative options come up, same way you type e.g. accented characters.


Replies

redwall_hpyesterday at 8:41 PM

Macs have two possible ways. If you have key repeat enabled, option+shift+dash. Some newer Mac users may have the mode on where holding a key pops up an iOS-style bubble of alternate options, in which case they will just hold hyphen.

alexfringesyesterday at 7:13 PM

You can also just type two "-" minuses on iOS. So "--" will auto-convert to "—".