Square brackets without links

My least favorite Markdown feature is how it hijacks square brackets to make links. (Usually writing for print, I use square brackets inside of quotations and parentheses all the time, and links almost never.) In apps that let me change the Markdown syntax, I usually just kill the default linking style, but it seems like there’s an alternative: Is it possible for the syntax highlighting to recognize the difference between [square brackets with no trailing open paren] and [this kind of link](internet.com), so that only actual links are highlighted and normal text between square brackets left alone?

Currently could kludge it with custom CSS to just not highlight links in the editor view (since preview works fine by default), but since I’m still shopping for my overall CSS it would be nice to not have to go in and edit this particular setting every time. (And, I haven’t dug into the CSS enough to know whether this is fixable, but my efforts to kludge also end up killing highlighting on things like tags.)

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You seem familiar with markdown and probably already knew this, but you can prevent linking by adding a preceding backslash (\) to your bracket.

In edit mode:

[this appears as a link]
\[this does not appear as a link]
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