> And they require a combination of two keys, pressed twice, on international keyboards.

It's a single keypress on US and UK QWERTY or Apple US-International, it's probably two keypresses on most european keyboards.

> If you want ```

In rST? Why would you want that?

> If your language, or any of your software, ever uses grave accents, it’s dead to me.

At least you get easier language choices: no bash or Z shells, no D, no Go, no Haskell, no ES6, no OCaml, no F#.

> For example, multiline or highlighted code in GitHub’s markdown

My comment is about reStructuredText, and specifically the inline external link syntax. If you want to complain about Markdown syntax may I suggest one of the markdown subthreads instead?

> It's a single keypress on US and UK QWERTY or Apple US-International, it's probably two keypresses on most european keyboards.

This is the German layout, it’s used by over 150 million people worldwide. It’s on shift-', and it’s a deadkey for using it as accent.

> At least you get easier language choices: no bash or Z shells, no D, no Go, no Haskell, no ES6, no OCaml, no F#.

In bash and ZSH I simply use other solutions for the same purpose like $() and co, and when I need it in Go or Haskell I simply have ` in my clipboard, and I don’t use the rest.

> My comment is about reStructuredText, and specifically the inline external link syntax. If you want to complain about Markdown syntax may I suggest one of the markdown subthreads instead?

Well, I’m saying this is an issue with both of them.

That is indeed annoying.

If you use X11 (at least on Linux), and have a useless key in your layout, try to find its keycode from the output of "xmodmap -pke". If you want to enter the backtick without a modifier key, it should be the first symbol after the equals sign. Replace that symbol with "grave" and feed the whole line to "xmodmap -" (or, if you prefer, "xmodmap -e 'keycode XX = grave ...'").

This is not ideal, but I think preferable to flogging all those dead keys :)

I have no idea how to achieve the same on Windows or Mac; I suppose they have more user friendly mechanisms to remap keys.

I simply always have ` in one of my clipboards, and paste it. Using ctrl-shift-v to paste it is still easier than bashing that dead key. Still, on system start it’s not there, and I need to get it into that first, and that’s needlessly complicated.

So I avoid anything that relies on it.

On my European keyboard it's just one keypress, no combo. Also nitpick: you'd probably just hold shift down for that... However I agree with your overall sentiment. I made a Sublime macro to avoid typing [```, {return}, ```, {up-arrow}] in Markdown.

Oh, do you have deadkeys disabled? That might be the cause, but generally all newer european layouts have deadkeys on, including DE since T2.