I find myself struggling with a supposedly simple task but after several hours of searching and trial&error I finally give up. I probably still lack the deeper understanding of LaTeX and its internals.

In the following MWE I would like to refer to commands and macros (e.g., `\usepackage`) by printing them as plain text (step 1).
To get rid of the `\textbackslash`, I thought I could wrap them in an inline listing (step 2). This still works as expected. Trouble started when I tried to create a macro for that (step 3). As an argument to my macro, commands are not interpreted as text but as the commands themselves, I guess, causing an `Improper alphabetic constant` error in my example.

```latex
\documentclass[a4paper,11pt]{scrartcl}
\usepackage{listings}

\newcommand{\commandToText}[1]{\lstinline{#1}} %step 3

\begin{document}  
\textbackslash usepackage %step 1
\lstinline{\usepackage} %step 2
\commandToText{\usepackage} %step 3
\end{document}

```

After some search I found `\detonkenize` to probably be the command needed to fix this.
At least `\newcommand{\commandToText}[1]{\detokenize{#1}}` prints the argument as plain text regardless of whether or not a command is provided as input.

Unfortunately, wrapping the argument with an inline listing `\newcommand{\commandToText}[1]{\lstinline{\detokenize{#1}}}` pdflatex does not terminate anymore.

I wonder if detokenizing is the best approach to interpret commands given as arguments as plain text. Maybe there are other alternatives? Or can `lstinline` be convinced to work with the detokenized commands?

**UPDATE:**
I realize from the comments and the answer that my MWE is too minimal as it leaves out two aspects:

* I use the `listings` package in various configurations (e.g., for code, JSON, explanations) and appreciate the possibility to easily define and adapt the common style to my needs. Alternatives like `\texttt` or `\verb` to me felt like being less convenient. But if the answer is, my goal cannot be achieved using `\lstinline` then one of these might be the alternative.
* `\commandToText` should be able to receive further decorations. For example, currently I use the package `realboxes` to further highlight the text: `\newcommand{\commandToText}[1]{\Colorbox{yellow}{\lstinline{#1}}}`.
To my knowledge, just wrapping `\lstinline` without specifying arguments (as proposed by Skillmon and egreg) would not allow to do so.

I wonder why step 3 above does not work. I would have expected `\lstinline` to already convert to plain text. It does so if it is called outside of a macro. But if it is used on the argument of a macro it doesn't.
Similarly, `\newcommand{\commandToText}[1]{\Colorbox{yellow}{\verb|#1|}}` does not work as the argument seems to be interpreted before `\verb` is applied. I guess, this is related to how these commands are expanded?