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Comment by OskarS | Hacker News Reader

Overly aggresive is right! I don't know if this is genius or deranged! I'm leaning towards genius and stealing the idea.

By the way: what's your beef with en dashes? I mean, if it was "everything should be 'HYPHEN-MINUS' (U+002D)", then fine, but why specifically en dashes and not em dashes?

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> By the way: what's your beef with en dashes?

Of all the changes in that list, removing the character that doesn't appear on a standard keyboard seems like the least controversial...

To add, it's a character that gets magically inserted for no reason in various situations.

It's up there with those damn angled quotes.

A better question might be "how did it get there in the first place?"

Presume all inputs are hostile.

Whether people or processes, something is likely to introduce the character at some point.

Sw which converts -- and __ on the fly. Same sw converts quote pairs "for your convenience"

Opt+- if you use macOS, long press on - if you use any Apple touch OS.

I totally agree that for some people, this could be a terrible command to have around. However, I know that it has been working for me for about 8+ years or so. I almost always run in in my ~/Downloads folder on files that I don't really care about. I download a lot of academic papers and books, and this just saves me a lot of time to put files in the format I like: author--paper-title.pdf. And that's part of the reason why I make all of the dashes the same, so if I'm opening something by an author, I can easily autocomplete and not have to remember how to make other sorts of dashes on the command line.

For a download folder in particular, this does sound like a great idea. You'd break the list in the browser or whatever, but who cares about that?

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