What's HN intelligent opinion about usage of long and short dashes?

To give you some context, here's a short example of the same text formatted using two different punctuation characters that can be considered more or less of the same "nature".

Option-1: "without significant effort—stop financing him" Option-2: "without significant effort — stop financing him"

In many human-written languages the correct one is Option-2 and it actually reads "nicer" to me in both English and other languages. I also know that a lot of English speakers opt out for Option-2, but the correct (or so I heard) is version Option-1. This, obviously, only applies to "long" dashes and printed material (even if on the web). For "short" dashes people either type single dashes or long dashes or double-dashes such as in:

    "without significant effort -- stop financing him"

So which way(s) should it be or what would you recommend if all options were equally convenient?

The questions above only concerns:

  1) Long dashes "Em Dash" character ("—" or U+2014) and, possibly, En Dash ("–" or U+2013)

  2) Printed material whether on the web or on paper.

  3) Possibly README files and code-comments
     (- vs -- and spaces around it or even using (1) and (2) instead in READMEs and code
     comments on purpose.

Note A: Mac, "MS Word" or "Libre Text" editors users, please don't post about how this software does automatic substitution for you. This isn't the nature of my question. My question is: how would you format it in principle, if all options were equally convenient.

Note B: I'm mostly interested in how a true Unix culture would approach it, although other answers are very welcome two. For instance, there isn't much of a Unix culture when it comes to text printed for mass-consumption (or, perhaps, I'm wrong).