TL;DR

It beats me that I had to use AutoHotKey for two simple keys.

I’m Italian and I use the Italian keyboard layout. No big deal.

Up to some Windowses ago, I had to build my own custom keyboard layout because, as it appears, neither the backtick nor the tilde are anywhere to be found in the keyboard.

No, I don’t consider typing the code on the numeric pad anything that is meaningful to consider. Especially on a laptop keyboard without a separate numeric pad.

As much as it already left me extremely dubious about the care that Microsoft might have for foreigners, it went even beyond this. With Windows 11 (Home edition, at least) it seems that I’m neither able to install the keyboard layout generator, nor able to install a previously cooked layout.

So much for Windows Subsystem for Linux, right?

I looked around and found AutoHotKey, which is a big cannon to fire at a mosquito, but still it’s the only thing that seems to solve my problem. By the way, these are the mappings that I added and work for me:

#Requires AutoHotkey v2.0
<^>!'::Send "``"
<^>!vkDD::Send "~"

I took inspiration from this gist, which in a turn of events didn’t work right off the bat for me. I don’t know if it’s because of the AutoHotKey version, or because quotation characters got lost in producing the gist, or just because everything seems to necessarily be cumbersome and frustrating when dealing with such basic needs.

My last thought is for the people who accept to type the Alt-whatever combination on the numeric pad: there’s a better way and you are encouraged to not settle with such nonsense.

Rant concluded, stay safe folks!