You literally can just long press the normal hyphen on the iOS keyboard, probably similar in Android

So, you saw an em dash in a sentence and immediately screamed “AI!”? Hold up. That long, dramatic line — yeah, that one — has been around way before ChatGPT slid into your DMs. Writers have been using em dashes for centuries to spice things up, create vibes, and break the rules in the coolest way possible.

Here’s the tea: the em dash is a tool, not a tell. Just because an AI uses it doesn’t mean it’s some secret signature. You know who else uses em dashes? Literally every author who’s ever wanted to sound clever, casual, or just a little chaotic.

So next time you spot an em dash, don’t panic. It’s punctuation, not a personality test.

  • ∞ 🏳️‍⚧️Edie [it/its, she/her, fae/faer, love/loves, ze/hir, des/pair, none/use name, undecided]@hexbear.netEnglish
    1·
    1 day ago

    There exists multiple ways of inserting unicode chars:

    • Visual selectors, like the character map in Windows, or gucharmap (gnome) or kcharselect (kde), and probably more
    • Decimal input
      • On Windows if you have a numeric keypad, you can hold down the Alt key and type in the unicode code point expressed in decimal… with some caveats, the decimal for em-dash should be 8212 (see the next line), but in windows alt codes it is 0151
      • In html—and therefore potentially in markdown—it is possible to use &#[NUM]; to input it, like this: —, which gives you the —
    • Hexadecimal input
      • can be enabled in windows and macos, see the wikipedia link for more info
      • ctrl+shift+u works… in some places
        • With an IME such as ibus or fcitx5 installed on linux, it should work through the system
        • For me, it works (without an ime installed) in Firefox
        • Wikipedia says it may work in other X11 applications
    • Clicking the Compose key (Linux. May need to be enabled), and writing — will get you an em-dash