More than forty years after the Macintosh keyboard was introduced, Windows may be getting a sane way to produce an em dash. According to an article in The Register, the perennially snarky tech-news site, there is now a way to make an em dash on a Windows keyboard that is somewhat more efficient than holding down the alt key and typing 0151 on the numeric keypad (not on the number keys at the top of the keyboard, because that would be cheating, and Microsoft hates cheaters).

So at last Windows has an em dash! But only for special people.

Right now, the article explains, em dashes are still an experimental feature. Microsoft is not sure that all the bugs have been worked out yet; who knows whether a Windows-generated em dash might suddenly turn into an ampersand or a guillemet or a less-than-or-equal-to sign? You have to be a Windows Insider to have access to the experimental em dashes, and you have to have the right Windows Insider build, and even then you have to download a special program that allows you to change certain invisible settings in the Insider build of Windows, and then run that program, and then look in the obscure settings and find the one that allows you to type an em dash by typing shift-windows-hyphen.

But if the beta-testing gods send favorable omens, the em dash will eventually make it into the standard builds of Windows. With this amazing innovation, Windows users will at last be able to counter the long-resented Mac-user boast that Apple has superior em-dash technology.

Still no word on when Windows users will have access to proper apostrophes and quotation marks, but Microsoft moves deliberately.

Also no word yet on when the new em-dash capability will be removed in a mandatory Windows update.

At any rate, it is probably a bad idea for Windows users to place too much faith in a Microsoft em dash. If Microsoft invents an em dash, we can expect it to be bloated, inefficient, and unreliable, taking up most of your computer’s CPU cycles, with a significant chance of catastrophic data loss. Windows power users will continue to use their own kluges to produce em dashes; Linux users will continue to use their own homemade keyboard layouts, because the keyboard layout is just a text file. Meanwhile, the publishing industry will continue to prefer Apple, because Apple at least makes elementary concessions to typography.