The Trouble with ` – Random Notes
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The grave accent, or more commonly in programmer circles, the backtick. A tiny character with so many uses. With the advent of computers, it has diversified its traditional role as an àccent with new purposes. It marks code in Markdown and Markdown-ish syntaxes. It delimits template literals in JavaScript. It executes code in shells and PHP. And it drives me up the wall.
There is nothing wrong with `, don’t get me wrong. But its technological implementation often leaves something to be desired. In the Swedish keyboard layout that we also use here in Finland, it is a dead key. What this means, in short, is that when you press the key, it’s not yet written into the output. Instead, usually a “ghost” character is displayed that waits until you press the next key, when it will be combined with the next typed character. On macOS, after hitting `, the display looks something like `, and when typing a, it turns into à.
This means that when typing just a backtick itself, I have to hit the backtick first and then space. With Markdown’s code blocks that start with three backticks, I can luckily hit just three backticks and one space, since backticks can’t be combined with each other. The backtick is already in an unergonomic position on the keyboard and now I have to hit space as well. And there’s a lot of backtick usage nowadays, thanks to Markdown style markup being ubiquitous.
