Clean Em Dashes

JavaScript
OpenClip Team·v1.0.0·com.openclip.cleanemdashes
28installs
JavaScript
3 Settings
OpenClip ≥ 1.1.0
macOS 14+ Sonoma & Sequoia
View Source

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:

OptionTypeDefaultDescription
Replacement style (style)PickercommasTarget punctuation style: commas, parentheses, hyphens, or remove.
Clean spaced en-dashes (cleanEnDashes)ToggletrueWhen enabled, also cleans spaced en-dashes () often used as em-dash substitutes.
Clean double hyphens (cleanDoubleHyphens)ToggletrueWhen enabled, also cleans raw double hyphens (--).

Usage Examples#

  • Commas (Default):
  • Parentheses Style:
  • Standalone Explanation:
  • Bullet Points:

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.