> The use of em-dashes, which on most keyboard require a special key-combination that most people don’t know

Most people probably don't know, but I think on HN at least half of the users know how to do it.

It sucks to do this on Windows, but at least on Mac it's super easy and the shortcut makes perfect sense.

I don't have strong negative feelings about the era of LLM writing, but I resent that it has taken the em-dash from me. I have long used them as a strong disjunctive pause, stronger than a semicolon. I have gone back to semicolons after many instances of my comments or writing being dismissed as AI.

I will still sometimes use a pair of them for an abrupt appositive that stands out more than commas, as this seems to trigger people's AI radar less?

I can’t be the only one who has ever read https://practicaltypography.com/hyphens-and-dashes.html

I've been left wondering when is the world going to find out about Input Method Editor.

It lets users type all sorts of ‡s, (*´ڡ`●)s, 2026/01/19s, by name, on Windows, Mac, Linux, through pc101, standard dvorak, your custom qmk config, anywhere without much prior knowledge. All it takes is to have a little proto-AI that can range from floppy sizes to at most few hundred MBs in size, rewriting your input somewhere between the physical keyboard and text input API.

If I wanted em–dashes, I can do just that instantly – I'm on Windows and I don't know what are the key combinations. Doesn't matter. I say "emdash" and here be an em-dash. There should be the equivalent to this thing for everybody.

First time I’m hearing about a shortcut for this. I always use 2 hyphens. Is that not considered an em-dash ?

Now I'm actually curious to see statistics regarding the usage of em-dashes on HN before and after AI took over. The data is public, right? I'd do it myself, but unfortunately I'm lazy.