Make Windows support em-dash and en-dash creation similar to Mac

[shanselman]

📝 Provide a description of the new feature\

Mac makes it easier to use em- and en-dashes than Windows. There’s a pretty simple shortcut which works on laptops and desktop macOS systems by default.

To type an en-dash, you’ll need to press the Alt key and the Minus key at the same time. That’s it, you’ve now got an en-dash (–).
The em-dash works similarly — it merely requires one extra key. Hold down Alt + Shift + Minus for an em-dash. Boom, that’s it.

What is the expected behavior of the proposed feature? What is the scenario this would be used?

Make it work the same on Windows.

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[andrewmy]

I guess this is a matter of adjusting the English QWERTY keyboard layouts. IIRC, some layouts like Latvian QWERTY already has this behavior.

Would be cool to have it working regardless of the layout of course.

[eamodio]

Personally I would like the mac's automatic conversion of -- (two dashes) to an em-dash. But that would likely be much harder.

[poke]

As I’m some kind of a typography nerd, I really like using the typographically-correct characters when writing stuff. For a long time I have been using ALT-code sequences for this which eventually became muscle memory for me (e.g. ALT+0150 for en-dash, ALT+0151 for em-dash).

Then, a few years ago, I used Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator to create a custom keyboard layout in order to include some of my commonly used symbols, making them available as normal shortcuts. For example, the en-dash is available for me using AltGr + -, and em-dash using Shift + AltGr + -. I also have access to characters like “curly quotes” or the apostrophe.

Of course, where to place these characters highly depends on the keyboard layout you use. I extended the German keyboard layout which obviously has symbols in other places than the American QWERTY layout. For this reason, I do not think that there is one way some tool could realistically add additional keyboard sequences that work regardless of language. There are enough issues already with shortcuts in IDEs or other applications where the designed shortcuts simply don’t work in other keyboard languages.

It would make sense to eventually expand the default keyboard layouts within Windows to add shortcuts in a language-compatible manner. But I am not sure if this could or should be done using something like PowerTools. I would just recommend you to try building your own keyboard layout instead so you can add those symbols that you think are useful to you.

[kojoru]

A different approach would indeed be a special layout, like this already existing one: https://ilyabirman.net/projects/typography-layout/

That obviously only works of you already use US or RU layout, and is an all-or-nothing approach. So being able to add just a couple of symbols to existing layouts would also be helpful.

[soyfrien]

On a MacBook (and maybe keyboards without 10-key functionality) it's not clear how to remap shortcuts for the alt-keycodes needed in the Keyboard Manager. Would it be possible for the Remap shortcuts dialog to consider this scenario?

Actually, I haven't tested the dialog's behavior on a keyboard with the 10-key area, and don't know if the number sequence winds up as a single digit as it does on a MacBook.

I was drawn to PowerTools because work requires a Mac and Windows, and Bootcamp is the only legal solution for a single machine solution. So PowerTools became required base software to solve this Win/Command-key physical shift annoyance when switching between the OSes:

Might be a big deal for others forced into Bootcamp wanting to squash the quirky differences.

[crutkas]

@soyfrien for just doing these two keys, SharpKeys https://github.com/randyrants/sharpkeys may be a better solution. We do pure software solution so we can redo shortcuts but SharpKeys does reg based editing which may be better for that scenario

[crutkas]

@shanselman, this would be covered by either "Keyboard Rebind to ASCII Characters" #4467 or "Remap keyboard - remap keys to use certain symbols (Unicode)" #3826