How to Type an Em Dash on Mac (— and –)

Writers reach for the em dash constantly — like that — and the Mac makes it a first-class keystroke: Option+Shift+Hyphen. Its narrower sibling the en dash sits one modifier away. Add the smart-dashes auto-substitution and you may never type two hyphens in a row again. Here's the whole dash toolkit, including how to turn the automation off where it hurts.

The two keystrokes

• Option+Shift+Hyphen → — the em dash (U+2014) — the wide one, for breaks in thought, interruptions, and emphasis.
• Option+Hyphen → – the en dash (U+2013), the medium one, for ranges and connections: pages 10–20, the 2024–25 season, the London–Paris train.
• The plain Hyphen key stays what it always was: - for compound words and line breaks.

Both combos work in every app on macOS 13, 14, and 15 — they're characters, not formatting, so they paste cleanly into anything. Style note while you're here: American convention typically sets the em dash tight—like this—while British publishing often prefers a spaced en dash – like this – as the break character. Pick one and be consistent.

The automatic route: smart dashes

By default, macOS converts a typed double hyphen (--) into an em dash as you write in most Apple apps — TextEdit, Notes, Mail, Pages. That's the smart quotes and dashes substitution system. Control it globally:

1. Open System Settings → Keyboard.
2. Click Edit… next to Input Sources (the Text Input section).
3. Toggle Use smart quotes and dashes.

Per-app control usually lives in the menus: Edit → Substitutions → Smart Dashes in TextEdit, Notes, and most native apps — untick it there to spare a single app while keeping the convenience elsewhere. The substitution happens as you type, so existing text is never rewritten; toggling the setting only affects what you type next. There's also a Terminal switch for the global default:

# Turn off automatic dash substitution system-wide (relaunch apps to apply)
defaults write -g NSAutomaticDashSubstitutionEnabled -bool false

# Undo: turn it back on
defaults write -g NSAutomaticDashSubstitutionEnabled -bool true

When you want the conversion dead

Smart dashes are lovely in prose and poison in code. Two literal hyphens are command-line syntax (--help, --force), YAML markers, and SQL comments — paste an auto-converted em dash into a terminal and the command fails with an error message that mentions nothing about dashes. Code editors and terminals disable substitution themselves, but the trap springs when you draft a command in Notes or an email and paste it later. If you write technical text in Apple apps regularly, turning Smart Dashes off in those apps' Substitutions menus saves real debugging time. (Markdown writers: two hyphens surviving as hyphens is exactly what you want; let your Markdown renderer make the typographic call.)

If the combo produces something else

On non-US layouts the dash combos occasionally move. Open the Keyboard Viewer (enable the input menu in Keyboard settings, then Show Keyboard Viewer), hold Option, and look for the dashes — they're rarely far from the hyphen key. And for one-off insertion, the Character Viewer (Ctrl+Cmd+Space, search "em dash") always delivers.

One more member of the family for completeness: the true minus sign (U+2212, −) is yet another character — slightly wider than a hyphen, aligned with the crossbar of +. Spreadsheets and code want the plain hyphen-minus from the hyphen key; typeset math wants U+2212 from the Character Viewer. Four horizontal lines, four different jobs: hyphen for compounds, en dash for ranges, em dash for drama, minus for math. Knowing which is which is ninety percent of getting them right.