Irreal, as you all know, is an em-dash friendly site. Irreal has always liked them and now we like them even more because it puts a thumb in the eye of those mentally challenged folks who claim, erroneously, that “real people” don’t use em-dashes and their presence in a document is a sure sign of AI generated text.
It turns out that JTR over at The Art Of Not Asking Why is also an em-dash aficionado and has been struggling with how to enter them, especially when using Emacs. His final solution involves expand-abbrev but seems to me overly complicated. He types --- then immediately calls expand-abbrev by typing Ctrl+x `.
We here at Irreal have the same problem, of course, but solved it in what seems to me a much simpler way:
(defun jcs-insert-em-dash ()
"Insert an em-dash at point"
(interactive)
(insert 8212))
and
(global-set-key (kbd "H--") #'jcs-insert-em-dash)
I have Hyper bound to the right ⌘ Cmd key so it’s really easy to invoke it: thumb on Hyper and index finger on - and it inserts an em-dash directly into the source exactly as JTR wanted.
I don’t claim my solution is better than JTR’s, only that it suits me better. It’s just another example of Emacs letting you have it your way.