You’ve got Unicode and Emacs so take advantage of the 3 kinds of dashes available to every writer. Here is how with a little detail you might find pretty useful totally unrelated to dashes!
It is tough to remember when, where, and how to use the hyphen-minus -, en-dash –, and the em-dash — so I put everything to remember in a function. That is the most useful part of this hyphen story and I love it.
The other fun part about this was learning about how to insert characters so that Emacs thinks that you typed them. What I mean by this is that when you type on the keyboard Emacs tells other functions and code what happened and they do something about of it compared with just (insert "ing") it.
Here is the code, it uses the same keybindings to get those characters in macOS:
(defun help/real-insert (char) (cl-flet ((do-insert () (if (bound-and-true-p org-mode) (org-self-insert-command 1) (self-insert-command 1)))) (setq last-command-event char) (do-insert))) (defun help/insert-em-dash () "Insert a EM-DASH. - \"best limited to two appearances per sentence\" - \"can be used in place of commas to enhance readability. Note, however, that dashes are always more emphatic than commas\" - \"can replace a pair of parentheses. Dashes are considered less formal than parentheses; they are also more intrusive. If you want to draw attention to the parenthetical content, use dashes. If you want to include the parenthetical content more subtly, use parentheses.\" - \"Note that when dashes are used in place of parentheses, surrounding punctuation should be omitted.\" - \"can be used in place of a colon when you want to emphasize the conclusion of your sentence. The dash is less formal than the colon.\" - \"Two em dashes can be used to indicate missing portions of a word, whether unknown or intentionally omitted.\" - \"When an entire word is missing, either two or three em dashes can be used. Whichever length you choose, use it consistently throughout your document. Surrounding punctuation should be placed as usual.\" - \"The em dash is typically used without spaces on either side, and that is the style used in this guide. Most newspapers, however, set the em dash off with a single space on each side.\" Source: URL `https://www.thepunctuationguide.com/em-dash.html'" (interactive) (help/real-insert ?—)) (defun help/insert-en-dash () "Insert a EN-DASH. - \"is used to represent a span or range of numbers, dates, or time. There should be no space between the en dash and the adjacent material. Depending on the context, the en dash is read as “to” or “through.”\" - \"If you introduce a span or range with words such as 'from' or 'between', do not use the en dash.\" - \"is used to report scores or results of contests.\" - \"an also be used between words to represent conflict, connection, or direction.\" - \"When a compound adjective is formed with an element that is itself an open compound or hyphenated compound, some writers replace the customary hyphen with an en dash. This is an aesthetic choice more than anything. Source: URL `https://www.thepunctuationguide.com/en-dash.html'" (interactive) (help/real-insert ?–)) (defun help/insert-hyphen () "Insert a HYPHEN - \"For most writers, the hyphen’s primary function is the formation of certain compound terms. The hyphen is also used for word division [in typesetting]. - \"Compound terms are those that consist of more than one word but represent a single item or idea.\" Source: URL `https://www.thepunctuationguide.com/hyphen.html'" (interactive) (help/real-insert ?-)) (global-set-key (kbd "-") #'help/insert-hyphen) (global-set-key (kbd "s-_") #'help/insert-em-dash) (global-set-key (kbd "s--") #'help/insert-en-dash)