On Mac and some other systems, typing two hyphens quickly "--", would be automatically converted to an em dash "—" or an en dash "–" depending on the setting. But Stack Exchange fields are different, and this feature does not work.
Therefore, how to type dashes in Stack Exchange?
The HTML entities – and — work on all systems: in the rendered post, they will be shown as – resp. —.
On a Mac (and on iOS devices connected to a physical keyboard), you can use ⌥ + - for an en-dash and ⇧ Shift + ⌥ + - for an em-dash. (⌥ is the Option or Alt key).
On iOS, you can hold the - button and a sub-menu will appear which allows you to choose between different types of dashes.
On Windows, if you have a numeric keypad, you can use Alt + 0150 resp. Alt + 0151.
On Chrome OS and some Linux distros, you can press Ctrl+Shift+U, then type:
2013 for an en-dash, or2014 for an em-dash(You can also type the hex code of any other Unicode character to enter it, too)
In Linux, if you set up a keyboard layout that includes a Compose key (e.g., there is an option to map it to the useless Windows menu key on standard PC keyboards), you can type an en-dash with Compose+--. and an em-dash with Compose+---.
AltGr+Shift+- produces U+0323 Combining Dot Below. It would seem that AltGr shortcuts heavily depend on the keyboard layout in use.
Commented
Jun 25, 2021 at 17:11
AltGr as the Compose key, the above answer works with English US layout, but it doesn't work with the layout in which AltGr+Shift+- does work (one called Romanian Standard).
The system doesn't have a way to do this. People achieve it by having their own shortcuts or by copying and pasting them.
Shift plus dash becomes underscore because that's how QWERTY keyboards are set up. That's not a Stack Exchange customization.
In addition to what @Glorfindel has mentioned about the use of
On a Mac (and on iOS devices connected to a physical keyboard), you can use ⌥ + - for an en-dash and ⇧ Shift + ⌥ + - for an em-dash. (⌥ is the Option or Alt key).
On Windows, if you have a numeric keypad, you can use Alt + 0150 resp. Alt + 0151.
There's a great extension ChromeDash that solves this problem gracefully. I find this to be a much better solution than using the cumbersome commands. But note that this only works on Google Chrome.
Simple Instructions of use-case
Simply enter two dashes (hyphens) for an en–dash, and three for an em–dash! This can be changed, as can all other aliases you make!
This works nearly anywhere, in google, hangouts, messenger, facebook, etc.
