For people/text authors who care, hyphen-minus is already hyphen-biased: most hyphen-minuses you encounter from average text authors (who don’t care) are meant

For people/text authors who care, hyphen-minus is already hyphen-biased: most hyphen-minuses you encounter from average text authors (who don’t care) are meant to be hyphens. And for people who care it is even more slanted: - They will either use `--` or `---` as poor man’s en/em-dash or use the proper symbols - They might use the proper minus sign but even if they don’t: post-processing can guess what is meant as “minus” in basic contexts (and even for math-heavy contexts: hyphens aren’t that common) Furthermore hyphen-minus is rendered as a hyphen already. Not as minus or a dash. It’s like a process of elimination: people who care already treat non-hyphens sufficiently different such that the usage of hyphen-minus is clear: it is just hyphen. For me these things is mostly about looks and author-intent. Dashes look better than poor man’s dashes. Hyphen-minus looks like a hyphen minus already. And if I use hyphen-minus then I mean hyphen. And for me it is less about using the correct character at the expense of possible inter-operation: the hyphen-minus is so widespread that I have no idea if 95% of software will even cope with using the real HYPHEN Unicode scalar. (I very much doubt that!) The last thing is keyboard usability economics. I use en-dash/em-dash a few times per paragraph at most. Hyphens can occur several times a sentence. And since I need hyphen-minus as well (see previous point about interoperability) most keyboard setups will probably need to relegate it to some modifier keybind like AltGr-something… and no one has the patience for typing such a common symbol with a modifier combo.