There are two ways to access Character Viewer: To access all of them, your Mac has a special menu called Character Viewer, which contains all the special symbols you might ever need. In reality, you don't just deal with two special characters like en dash and em dash - there are hundreds that you might need to use occasionally, from currency icons to emoji. However, if the text looks cramped, inserting a single space on each side could make it look better and more legible. Tip: Generally, you don't offset en and em dashes with spaces around them. And when there's so many other shortcuts you keep in your head on a daily basis, it might be difficult to do. The only problem is that to use these en and em dash shortcuts effectively, you need to remember them. To type an em dash on keyboard, press Shift + Option + hyphen (-).To type an en dash, press Option + hyphen (-).On Macs, the long dash symbol situation is much easier.
WHATS AN EM DASH ON KEYBOARD CODE
There's no shortcut and the only way to do it on a keyboard is to type the em dash alt code (Alt + 0151) or the en dash alt code (Alt + 0150).
WHATS AN EM DASH ON KEYBOARD HOW TO
If you've used Windows previously and looked into how to type an em dash, you'd agree it's a bit overwhelming.
The em dash is primarily used to break the sentence in parts, either for a separate commentary, similar to parentheses, or to provide more context to an idea, similar to a colon.īut how do you en and em dash Mac type? What are en and em dash alt codes? Do you need to alt code long dash on Mac? Let's explore.