kstedman

Thanks for the tips, everyone. I've looked into hotkey software before, and I've tried memorizing the alt-code, and I get that both are likely the best solutions. Yet there's still that rebellious part of me that thinks, "I shouldn't have to find workarounds for simple, common typographic symbols--in a really good product, they should be baked into the product in easy-to-use ways." Idealistic, I know! Thanks again to all.

Sorry about the voting thing; I'm brand new here and the only thing that looked like a vote on OP's post was the heart, so I clicked it, thinking that was what you meant. I see now that there's another place to vote, which I'll do now. For me, I have 2 reasons: As a teacher and scholar, I use Evernote primarily as a place to take notes on what I'm reading, including typing quotes I might want to use later, and those notes very often include em-dashes. In Evernote, I have to instead type two hyphens in a row on my PC--Macs have a keyboard shortcut for dashes, but PCs don't--and then if I ever use those typed quotations in something else I'm writing, I need to manually change them to em-dashes. In Word and Google Docs, typing two hyphens magically creates an em-dash (though in slightly different ways), but it doesn't work if you paste in something you typed elsewhere. So ultimately, it makes more work for me to type quotations one way and then have to fix them later. It feels old-fashioned and kind of ugly for the dash not to appear after typing two hyphens, honestly. That is, there's an aesthetic element where sentences without automatic dashes look more like something typed in Notepad or DOS, not elegant. I know those aren't the same reasons for everyone, just me--but I do love a good dash.

Yes yes yes, please!