Clean Em Dashes

Tame AI-generated text by replacing excessive em-dashes (—) with natural punctuation.

Large language models (such as ChatGPT and Claude) frequently overuse em-dashes in prose, articles, and emails. Clean Em Dashes instantly cleans up highlighted text, replacing awkward dashes with fluent commas, parentheses, or hyphens while preserving sentence flow and whitespace.

Features#

• Intelligent Parenthetical Handling: Automatically detects paired parenthetical dashes (— like this —) and transforms them into natural commas (, like this,) or parentheses.
• Natural Connectors: Smoothly converts standalone dashes before explanations or afterthoughts into standard commas.
• Punctuation Collision Prevention: Automatically cleans up redundant spaces, duplicate commas, and dashes colliding with existing periods or question marks.
• List Preservation: Neatly converts lines starting with em-dash bullet points (— Item) into standard markdown bullets (- Item).
• Protected Number Ranges: Safely leaves numeric en-dash ranges (such as 1990–2000 or pp. 15–20) untouched.

Options#

Customize transformation behavior under OpenClip Preferences → Actions → Clean Em Dashes:

Usage Examples#

• Commas (Default):
  • Before: The new release — announced yesterday — delivers faster speeds.
  • After: The new release, announced yesterday, delivers faster speeds.
• Parentheses Style:
  • Before: The team — led by veteran engineers — completed the audit.
  • After: The team (led by veteran engineers) completed the audit.
• Standalone Explanation:
  • Before: There is only one issue — the build failed.
  • After: There is only one issue, the build failed.
• Bullet Points:
  • Before: — Feature A\n— Feature B
  • After: - Feature A\n- Feature B

Privacy & Local Execution#

• All text transformations run 100% locally on your Mac inside OpenClip's JavaScriptCore runtime.
• No text is uploaded to any server, cloud service, or third party.