Can't you do this.. in.. idk, the co
Have fun trying to close the console when you're done.
Actually you can probably type in a command to close the console.
I'm pretty sure you can send messages with a ~ in them and the way I've always done it is just copy and paste it in from notepad.
Also it's technically the ` key because to type ~ you need to hold down shift. So when you're looking for the bind search for `.