On dashes, hyphens, and other important aspects of life.

Re:On dashes, hyphens, and other important aspects of life. by paul_f on Wednesday September 25, 2013 @09:02AM (#6444249)

The problem for me is remembering how to create the various dashes on a typical keyboard.

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Re:On dashes, hyphens, and other important aspects of life. by chrismorgan on Wednesday September 25, 2013 @09:14AM (#6444317)

I type Ctrl+Shift+U 2014 Space (U+2014 EM DASH) surprisingly regularly. (That's with Ubuntu.) U+2013 is EN DASH and U+2010 is HYPHEN.

Does anyone else find that they know dozens of Unicode code points purely by accident? Other useful ones in that block are U+2018, U+2019, U+201C and U+201D, the left and right (first and third) single and double quotation marks...

In the end, though, I really wish everything supported Vim's digraphs. (e.g. Ctrl+K l * produces λ.) I know even more of those than I know numeric codepoints…

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Re:On dashes, hyphens, and other important aspects of life. by psuter on Wednesday September 25, 2013 @10:15AM (#6444678)

I find using the compose key easier than remembering Unicode points. For em dash: `Compose - - -`, for en dash: `Compose - - .`.

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Re:On dashes, hyphens, and other important aspects of life. by GrinningFool on Wednesday September 25, 2013 @10:58AM (#6444961)

Didn't know about C+S+U - thanks!

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Re:On dashes, hyphens, and other important aspects of life. by weeksie on Wednesday September 25, 2013 @09:42AM (#6444470)

Macs are great for this. Option-hyphen gives you an en-dash and option-shift-hyphen gives you an em-dash.

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Re:On dashes, hyphens, and other important aspects of life. by jtymes on Wednesday September 25, 2013 @09:20AM (#6444360)

The linked Wikipiedia article has some shortcuts further down: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash#Rendering_dashes_on_comput...

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Re:On dashes, hyphens, and other important aspects of life. by grinnick on Wednesday September 25, 2013 @09:13AM (#6444312)

That's was I was wondering. How do I write an Em dash on a keyboard? I've always just used a hyphen for this (but I'd like to do it right).

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Re:On dashes, hyphens, and other important aspects of life. by rebelde on Wednesday September 25, 2013 @09:33AM (#6444432)

I have used MS's Keyboard Layout Creator to add those — and many others — to my keyboard. Right-alt-minus for en–dash and shift-right-alt-minus for em—dash.

What I really want is for my keyboard to act like my mobile phone keyboard — a long press to see similar characters. Anybody care to code it?

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Re:On dashes, hyphens, and other important aspects of life. by zokier on Wednesday September 25, 2013 @09:38AM (#6444457)

Custom layouts FTW. I have the following line in my layout configuration (Linux/xkb):

    key <AE11> { [  minus,          underscore,     endash,         emdash          ] };

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Re:On dashes, hyphens, and other important aspects of life. by nucleardog on Wednesday September 25, 2013 @09:53AM (#6444546)

That's what my Macbook does. It actually drives me crazy because you lose key repeat. You have to furiously mash keys in vim, no holding them down.

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Re:On dashes, hyphens, and other important aspects of life. by rebelde on Wednesday September 25, 2013 @10:44AM (#6444861)

Macs do that??? I'm surprised that I never discovered it on the wife's Mac. I deal with other languages so much, this might be the one thing that tips me toward using one.

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Re:On dashes, hyphens, and other important aspects of life. by kps on Wednesday September 25, 2013 @10:50AM (#6444910)

    defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false

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Re:On dashes, hyphens, and other important aspects of life. by Dylan16807 on Wednesday September 25, 2013 @10:17AM (#6444691)

It should be easy to use a meta key to specify you want a menu. I wonder if anyone's made the option.

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