Unicode

I try to use hyphens and dashes correctly—mainly because it makes me happy when I see them applied properly. Additionally, I find it frustrating when I see a line break where there shouldn’t be one (e.g., between § and 1). Until now, I’ve been entering them based on the type of document I’m working on (e.g., —/  for HTML, - - -/~ for LaTeX, ...). However, I recently switched to Obsidian and wasn’t sure how to input these characters correctly in Markdown.

To address this, I started exploring how to input these special characters more generally. One option was to map specific characters to specific keys on my keyboard, but I wanted a more general solution. As it turns out, Linux provides a handy method: you can use Ctrl+Shift+U to enter Unicode characters. For now, I’ve decided to adopt this general approach, though I may still map frequently used characters to specific keys in the future.

For my reference, here are some Unicode mappings I’ve looked into:

• en-dash (–): 2013
• em-dash (—): 2014
• nbsp ( ): a0
• double curly quote start (“): 201C
• double curly quote end (“): 201D
• Copyright (©): 00A9