Special characters

"...That's it?!"

“…That's it⁈”

I noticed some people use characters that aren't easy to type on a normal keyboard. Recently I started using the special quotation marks through key combos on my keyboard because they look better, but I haven't started using the ellipses character except in the one chapter title.

Do you use these special characters? If so, why, how and when do you use them?

And since I guess it's relevant, too, do you use a single, double or large space between sentences and why?

Comments

[ferret]

I use the emacs editor, because it works in console mode, but doesn't glitch out on word wrapping like vim. I use typopunct.el so that in text (or markdown) mode, it automatically inserts the smart quotes when I hit ".

For when I can't use emacs, I also set up the X11 Compose Key so that I can hit "right alt" and then type <" to get “ and >" to get ”. Mostly I use that for —, which is ralt, then ---.

I like using smart quotes, not just because it looks good, but because it's easier to parse. '"' is just one character, used to start and end quotes, whereas “ and ” are different for starting and ending. Not using smart quotes is kind of like using only the left parentheses in your parenthetical expressions (and that would be just terrible (and I do mean terrible( wouldn't it?(

Honestly I'd rather just use parentheses as quotation marks. I could even use an angle bracket to make it look like a speech bubble!

< ( ferret is a total loser, with no friends and no life! )
< ( Seriously, we need to stage an intervention. )