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Comment by thepete2 | Hacker News Reader

I love anki, but I really don't like the code. I wish we could build something modern, but still open, from scratch.

Get to it! The code is open source, so the Anki deck format is as well. You could write new application software that works with the deck format and plug into a large, existing ecosystem of users.

Could you be specific? What are the problems with the codebase?

I've found that as a user, there are some really powerful features in Anki. The distinction between notes and cards wasn't clear to me at first, but once I discovered it, it allowed me to create some really useful decks. Being able to create multiple cards, with HTML and CSS styling, testing various elements of the same note is really nice.

Some of it has to do with the code base but some the UI.

Anki sync is slow, often requires full re-sync.

I also don't like how a lot of the core functionality has to be implemented via plugins.

This is being too negative though. Anki is great. Nothing is perfect. It has a lot of features that nothing else out there has.

It's kind of like an old and reliable battleship that can't be sunk. (I mean this in a good way).

It's too tightly coupled, doesn't really follow best practices and is barely documented. When I wanted to improve it, it just wasn't very inviting :/

Fully agree with your 2nd paragraph though

The fact that `sudo apt install anki` doesn't work out of the box is enough of a problem for me.

Ok, the install works, but the software never runs.

This is one of the reasons my laptop is booting into Windows more often than into Linux these days.

This has nothing to do with Anki though right? It’s the package maintainers you should be talking to.

Do you or anyone else have a perspective on how mnemosyne compares in this aspect? https://github.com/mnemosyne-proj/mnemosyne

It doesn't have an app as far as I know. It's a Python/Qt project as well and at a glance the code looks better, but in terms of features I think it just doesn't compare to Anki.

It does have an app:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mnemosyne

I can't comment on the feature differences but the community is much much smaller so I wouldn't be surprised.

I love Anki but haven't seen the code, but I don't think a rewrite is the answer, and in fact could result in a new code base with the same problem over long enough time. If you're noticing this problem, it would be great if you were able to get in touch with the author (maybe start an issue thread on GitHub) to at least start a dialogue to improve the state of the documentation and code conventions.

I'm not convinced either. But I have some ideas that would change the data representation of the flashcards and that's hard to do with anki

Play with Polar for a bit and let me know what you think.

This is sort of the idea but Anki is still pretty amazing in a lot of ways if you're a power user.

I'm trying to make SR easier for people just getting into it.

For me the frustration was switching back and forth between my document reader and Anki.

I wanted something completely integrated.

Same here, I somehow need any app that I use to have feel like a modern up to date design. Said that, this sound like an interesting exercise to do.

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