[frosted-flakes]

A dedicated global compose key solves this problem very elegantly. Hitting the ◆ compose key (right alt for me) followed by a series of intuitive characters inserts the corresponding character.

For example:

◆ - - - produces an em dash (—)

◆ - - . produces an en dash (–)

◆ ' e produces é

◆ | c produces the cent symbol (¢)

Usually, you can just guess the combination and be right 3/4 times. Otherwise, it's fairly easy to look it up, or create it if it doesn't exist yet.

Some distros of Linux have this built-in, but I use WinCompose[1] on Windows.

[1]https://github.com/samhocevar/wincompose

[Freak_NL]

> Some distros of Linux have this built-in […]

Some? Nearly all of them do — usually it just needs to be activated in the desktop environment.

I used a … and an — in this post using the compose key without even thinking twice.

> Usually, you can just guess the combination and be right 3/4 times.

¾ even. Just guessing that it was <comp> 3 4.

[btown]

macOS has something very similar with the option key, but the set of characters doesn’t include all Greek letters which is incredibly annoying: https://sites.psu.edu/symbolcodes/mac/codemac/

[frosted-flakes]

Except most of the key combinations are not intuitive. I could never guess them like I could with a compose key.