[idoubtit]

> the hyphen-minus is too narrow. You can replace the minus signs with a wider dash, but that is semantically wrong and also a pain in the arse.

In this case, an alternative to "-", U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS, is "−", U+2212 MINUS SIGN. On Linux, I considered mapping the keypad substract key to it, but instead I configured a xcompose alias.

  gold +1.2%
  oil  −6.4%
  corn +5.2%

[aikinai]

It vexes me that almost no one uses the real minus sign. But you also can't blame them since it's never been made readily-available. So you really have to be pedantic and spend time going to get it if you want to use it.

[tiltowait]

Most people aren't even aware there's a "real" (or rather, fake) minus sign. I didn't know until reading this thread. The hyphen is right next to the +/= key, so it's not unreasonable at all to think the _/- key is minus.

[twic]

That's hyphen-minus, which is both a hyphen AND a minus:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyphen-minus

[xelamonster]

Yeah I had no idea either, but I'm sorry to say it's going in the same bucket as using a real em-dash vs a double hypen--if it's not on my keyboard it's not gonna happen.

[airstrike]

Mac OS has option+- for en dash and option+shift+- for em dash. I used to add similar bindings on Windows via AutoHotkey (which is an amazing app all around...)

There's also option+space for   and other goodies. I recently added option+x for "checkmark x" and option+v for "checkmark v" since I like dropping those around more often than I should...

[kaechle]

This. Em dashes are—as punctuation goes—downright sexy, so I committed shift+opt+- to muscle memory long ago. And it's arguably less work than a bucked-toothed double hyphen.

Btw, if you haven't already, check out Karabiner on macOS for AutoHotkey-esque functionality.

[dasyatidprime]

Re “configured”—what's your locale? In en_US.UTF-8 on my Arch system it's in the system file (/usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose) as <Multi_key> <minus> <underscore>.