I recently came accross the `\DefineShortVerb` command of the `fancyvrb` package, which lets you "[define a special character as an abbreviation
to enclose verbatim text](http://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/fancyvrb/doc/fancyvrb-doc.pdf)", so for example:

```
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fancyvrb}
\DefineShortVerb{\|}
\begin{document}
|this is verbatim|
\end{document}

```

I was wondering if and how this could be done for any other character and any other command. For example, say I wanted the text enclosed by the character ``` to be displayed in italic:

```
\documentclass{article}
% some code
\begin{document}
`this` and \textit{this} should be the same.
\end{document}

```

how could I do this?