Great news! We were discussing only the other day that this would be a more convenient way of creating new cells. Good to see keyboard shortcuts for selecting the cell mode (cycling with arrow keys), and for bold and italic formatting in markdown mode. Is there a similar keyboard shortcut for backtick code formatting inside markdown cells? If not, this would be a great addition allowing most common cell authoring content to be quickly created.
This also opens up the possibility for the same shortcuts generating their html equivalents in html mode, perhaps along with pairing up tags (e.g. when one creates a <p> and equivalent </p> is created after the caret position).