Quickly Type En Dashes And Em Dashes

To type a hyphen, you hit the key right next to the zero: -. But what about if you need the similar looking en dash and em dash?

Some programs have text areas that will automatically convert two consecutive dashes into an em dash.

There is a more reliable method that can get you both: these two keybindings which are a variation of the - key itself.

• Option - will produce an en dash (–), named that because it is typically the width of the n character.

• Option Shift - will produce an em dash (—), named that because it is typically the width of the m character.

The en dash seems to be the less familiar of the two. For more details on when to use that, check out this excerpt from Dreyer's English.

h/t Shawn Wang (@swyx)