Lately I have been really enjoying Obsidian as a personal knowledge base. It uses simple Markdown files, which makes maintaining synchronized cross-platform access easy and low impact.

The problem

I recently ran into a small problem when I decided to change my workflow to run Obsidian on my Windows PC host machine, instead of inside my Kali or Ubuntu virtual machines. Until now, I have largely been running Obsidian on my Macbook and inside my working machines on my PC. However, when I went to start my first .md in Windows, I quickly realized that my 65% keyboard lacks a ` / ~ key. Not being able to type backticks, and thus write code blocks, would make my markdown adventures a lot less convenient.

The Solution

Adding a hotkey mapping in Windows 10 is surprisngly easy, thanks to AutoHotkey. The AutoHotkey software is fully open-source and maintained by a non-profit foundation.

To add a backtick hotkey, simply create an .ahk file and fill it with the following line:

^'::Send ```

Note: three ``` characters are needed, as the backtick ( ` ) is the primary escape character in AutoHotkey scripts.

You now have an executable AutoHotkey script. If you place this file in the C:\Users\<your-username>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup directory, it will execute whenever Windows is started.