¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

I use em dashes extensively (–).

And, apparently, so do LLMs.

These days I feel that I need to put in some additional effort to make my sentences sound more natural / human, otherwise some people could erroneously assume that they’re LLM-generated.

C’est la vie.

On macOS, press Option + - to insert an em-dash (–).

Errata(2026-02-14): a reader has kindly pointed out the following:

• Em dash (—): Option (⌥) + Shift (⇧) + -
• En dash (–): Option (⌥) + -

…which means I’ve erroneously mixed them!

Alternatively, instruct nvim to insert an em-dash when typing the sequence --<space> (=two dashes followed by a space) in markdown files by changing ~/.config/nvim/after/ftplugin/markdown.lua:

-- Convert -- followed by space to em-dash
vim.keymap.set('i', '--<Space>', '—', { buffer = 0, desc = 'Em-dash' })

Or in vim (~/.vim/after/ftplugin/markdown.vim):

inoremap <buffer> -- —

Update(2026-02-04): a reader has kindly pointed out that there’s a mistake in my nomenclature, wherein this post is actually referring to en-dashes instead of em-dashes. I am sure he is absolutely right!