Why not just switch to VE?

Because (a) I am using VisualEditor (the wikitext mode is still part of Extension:VisualEditor) and (b) James keeps declining requests to enable the visual mode on talk pages,[1] even though these are the very pages where I am most likely to want to talk about a template rather than using it.

[1] for not completely unreasonable reasons. I grant this, but the non-un-reasonability of his thinking does not solve my problem.

<nowiki> isn't text style - it's a source mode escaping trick and has no semantic meaning.

maybe a little bit similar to T154113

Ed, I will cheerfully let you call it whatever you want, so long as you solve my problem. :-)

If the user has intentionally chosen to use the wikitext editor, then it is generally reasonable to assume that they know the intricacies of the syntax. This is definitely a worthwhile feature, but it's a nice to have.

If you use the wikitext-editor which is not part of the Visual Editor, you have https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Edittools or a project specific version of it like https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Onlyifediting.js (in combination with https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Edittools ; in the submenue "WikiSyntax") or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Edittools that contain <nowiki>-tags and many other. A new wikitext-editor shouldn't fall back behind the achievements of the old one.

Also, this needs a keyboard shortcut, because I need to be able to talk about wikitext in a Flow board, and I don't want to have to switch back and forth between visual and wikitext modes just to add 17 characters of what Ed calls "source mode escaping".

In T157625#3715406, @Deskana wrote:

If the user has intentionally chosen to use the wikitext editor, then it is generally reasonable to assume that they know the intricacies of the syntax. This is definitely a worthwhile feature, but it's a nice to have.

Only if they have that experience from prior to moving to VE-WTE (which I guess a number of power users do). If you plan to offer VE-WTE as the WTE of the future (which seems to be the intent), then new users will... need to learn the intricacies of the syntax. So, your assumption has a bit of a hole in it in its generality.

FYI, there's a user script that adds this functionality (in the text style menu, named "Disable markup"). I won't help you if it breaks, though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Matma_Rex/nwe-nowiki.js

From Talk:Talk pages project/Replying: why not make the <code> button output <nowiki> tags at the same time? It is quite unusual to want hand-formatted code tags (e.g. <code>x<b>y</b>z</code>) so this would rarely be an inconvenience to anyone and avoids button clutter.