You've actually touched on one of the benefits of RST with your complaint: there's no "magic" about Sphinx's "code-block", it's just a "directive" [1]. You can

You've actually touched on one of the benefits of RST with your complaint: there's no "magic" about Sphinx's "code-block", it's just a "directive" [1]. You can make your own directives which can optionally accept key/value parameters. This is technically superior to slapping blobs of HTML inside your Markdown, though I will concede that writing your own directives can be a bit tricky initially. [1]: http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/ref/rst/directives.html http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/ref/rst/directives.html