Show HN: Anki alternative with integrated notes and import/export | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Anki alternative with integrated notes and import/export

get21stnight.com

123 pointsklevertree128 comments

Anki user here, for about 5 years now studying Korean and to a lesser extent Japanese and miscellaneous topics.

This is cool, but I will never base my learning on a closed-source product. I simply don't trust anyone with data / workflows this important to me.

Anki doesn't have great UX, but it is -dependable-. It works, day in, day out, and I've had zero issues with it. I trust that in 5-10 years, my anki decks will be there and work exactly the same.

edit: I'm not trying to be negative. I think there is a lack of spaced repetition-based flashcard apps with great UX. However I personally value stability and guarantee of longevity over nice UX. If the developer of Anki quits tomorrow, it being open source ensures that it'll live on with new maintainers (even if that's just me).

Could you give some insight into how you use Anki for language learning? Thanks.

I studied Japanese, and went from 0 to JLPT N2 in 4 years. I attribute a lot of that to Anki/Ankidroid.

This is how I did it.

Usually when you start a language, you start with a textbook. It might be Genki Vol 1, or Nihongo So Matome 1, etc. I created two decks - a kanji deck, and a vocab deck. These decks were only for this single textbook. Every week when new kanji or vocab was introduced, I'd add those to the deck, and become familiar with them over the next week (while at the same time, reviewing existing vocab/kanji).

When that semester was over, and we started the next textbook in the new semester, I'd create two new decks. And so on and so on.

I think it's important to create the decks yourself. It gives you control, and makes you feel more invested in the process. For vocab, I'd always include example sentences. For Kanji, I'd actually have representations in two different fonts. One in the standard kanji font on your computer, but another in HonyaJi, a "hand-written" kanji font. For me, I just felt it helped when writing out the kanji to see how it looks handwritten.

The great thing about Ankidroid is the whiteboard feature. Use it!

If you're not studying a language with logographic characters like Chinese or Japanese, then great, you only need to worry about vocab!

(As for grammar, I never relied on Anki for that. Practice speaking, practice writing. Find local "conversation classes", where you meet up with native speakers. They can practice their English with you, and you can practice your new language with them. As for writing, check out a website called Lang-8. Native speakers look over your work for free, and in return you just take a few minutes to read over their stuff in English).

I concur with all of these points. I've also written a bit about Anki and updating some of the default settings for better retention. [0] Making a good template for cards changes everything, particularly with adding context / usage sentences on the back of the card. Also, switching to using the native definitions once you can instead of the english translations helps immensely.

For me, I -hated- how long it took to input words into Anki, so for ~7 months I used Evita's Korean Deck which has about 5.5k words. I eventually burned out and got tired of the lack of context in the cards, but that helped me learn a lot of day-to-day vocabulary. I tried this a bit with a Japanese 2k deck but I think with logographic language it doesn't really work as well as slowly inputting words that you know the context/definition for.

Nowadays I write down words from books/movies/etc that I don't know in my journal, and every once in a while I collect those into a personal anki deck. I actually am working on a CLI program that helps automate the process of searching a word's definitions and creating a card. It outputs all of the selected definitions into a csv, which I can then bulk import into Anki. [0]

It's important to do it every day. Anki by default allots 20 new words per day, but this is quite a lot unless one plans to spend a while every day on anki. I find 5-10 words is more tenable, and simply 1/day is better than 0/day if one burns out.

[0]: https://andrewzah.com/posts/2019/better-anki-usage-guide/

[1]: https://github.com/andrewzah/carajillo

Thank you!

Polyglot Youtubers seem to be divided when it comes to Anki's effectiveness for language learning:

Anki Vs. Input-Based Learning

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=t26IPxExmzs

How to Learn a Language: INPUT (Why most methods don't work)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=J_EQDtpYSNM

It's not either one or the other. Anki is a supplement to input received from native speakers and media. The idea of spaced repetition is to help one efficiently remember the thousands and thousands of words needed for a sophisticated vocabulary.

I definitely don't recommend anyone to try and learn a language from e.g. Anki only.

Indeed it's not one or the other, but if Krashen's "comprehensible input" theory [1] is (mostly) true, the role Anki (or any SRS system) or grammar books plays would be very small (if not non-existent), and many polyglots' opinion on Anki seems to back it up.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VYfpL6lcjE

I'm glad this comment was the first thing I saw. My first thought was "is it free software?", because it's a clear downgrade and not worth using over Anki if it's proprietary.

Am I smarter or stupider for not memorizing notes like I did as a student? I still take notes, and sometimes refer to them. (I also take a fair amount that never get read.) And I still learn things. But the learning I do is either because I read something once and it's already internalized ("Myanmar's anti-military activists have started using bombs,"), or because I've done something a lot and it's become ingrained ("docker exec -it phan bash").

There just aren't big lists of things I need to memorize, like there once were. Also, I'm certain I'm learning slower than I did as a student. But that could again be good or bad -- maybe I stopped learning as fast because I picked all the low-hanging fruit and I'm busy using it.

I certainly don't see lots of low-hanging fruit like I used to. But I always wonder if that's a failure of imagination.

since I'm largely in the same boat: I think it has more relevance in some fields than in others. E.g. programming is relatively good at naming things descriptively, but less-so many fields that name tons of things based on the discoverer, e.g. biology-related things have a fair bit of this. And obviously there are numerous exceptions in both directions.

For programming: I'm quite happy saying "learn concepts, not terms/frameworks". There's obviously some value in things you use a ton daily, but you'll naturally remember those through use - for the rest, thankfully, programmers are great at making things searchable, and there are loads of tools to search even when not (e.g. grep). Terms can be useful for communication purposes, learn them as needed and meh beyond that. Frameworks though are basically the programming-world equivalent of fashion, they change with the weather / at the whims of popular tweets. Yolo - learn how it works instead of the API, that's waaaay more useful, and is probably transferrable to dozens of other frameworks.

But as an example: I routinely forget the argument order and finer details of the various "split a string" funcs in the 3 or 4 languages I use ~weekly. Because I only use them every few months. And in my next language, quickly-recall-able memory of those other-lang patterns won't help me in the least (if anything, they might slow me down). Splitting a string though, and choosing which end to start from, and how many times to split, and the various i18n complications, is a general concept that's applicable in all languages.

It's a blessing I hadn't noticed, that my work does not require the perpetual memorization required by, say, pharmacology.

It's funny that society doesn't normally classify programmers as creatives. (Then again, it doesn't classify scientists that way either.)

I use Anki for infrequent power-user commands and e.g. Python modules I don't use often. There's a class of tasks that I do regularly, but infrequently enough that I have to hit Stack Overflow every time unless I've put it in Anki.

Some things just need more memorization than others. I used a ton of flashcards for Latin vocab and learning the farsi alphabet but almost none for my CS classes (used notes for those).

I'd enjoy seeing a complete list of the disciplines that require such rote learning. I think the broad categories might be "areas where people invent lots of arbitrary rules" (law, accounting, medical coding) and "complex systems we don't understand well" (chemistry, biology, neurology). Others?

I certainly take notes, specifically so that I don't need to remember things in detail. I know I can checkout my repository and have everything to hand in one-place.

But that said for learning a language these kind of tools are very useful.

Memorization is crucial for a subject like math. In a highly technical branch of math like, say, topology, definitions fly at one like bvllets from a m@chine gun. Just to solve a problem you might need immediate access in your head to some 12 definitions, 5 lemmas, 3 theorems, 4 corollaries and 6 prototype/canonical examples meaning you want to keep them all(along with their proofs as proofs carry important techniques and ideas) at the tip of your tongue and top of your head. Just because you "understood" them once in the past doesn't mean much if you cannot recall them immediately right where you need them. Obviously, you can look them up one by one (granted you know what you're looking for). Along the way, you'd have to re-understand them cause understanding is often fleeting in math, but this will make you lose time, momentum and get/keep you stuck in a thick quagmire making the original problem massively more difficult than it is.

Many very important results in math (that have become staples) are made up of extremely specific techniques that are very hard to reproduce even after 5 minutes one has read (and presumably understood) them. Even understanding in math comes in waves. To get a deeper understanding of an idea you'd need to have some preliminary grasp on it.

I often see the sentiment "in math if you understand something, you don't need to memorize it" on English speaking side of Internet. Contrast that with the old Soviet school (& modern Indian one?) philosophy which was "understand -> drill -> memorize". IMO, the former philosophy produces weaker, barely able mathematicians.

This vid below about Hitler learning topology echoes some of what's typed above.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyD4p8_y8Kw

How universal is this experience?

I remember a math grad student friend who said "math is a young man's game". He compared it to cycling; nothing you do in your old age would compare to what you could do earlier.

In fact according to him math is worse than cycling, if I'm correct that cyclists peak in their early 40s. Contrast that to economics, which specifically offers the Clark Medal for the best work performed by someone under forty, because old-timers would otherwise snaffle up every prize.

I am not sure I understand the connection you're making between the cumulative and highly technical nature of math and the age of a mathlete.

That's fair. I didn't relate that my friend went on to say that the reason math is a young man's game is that it's only the young who can read and memorize results fast enough, and keep enough of that information in their head at one time, to do important work at the frontiers of math. The brain has physical limits, just as the rest of the body does.

I am revolted by that idea. And I'm certainly a better coder than I was in my thirties, and I was better then than I was in my twenties. (Not that I'm under the illusion that my work compares to PhD-level math.)

People repeat that quote a lot, but I don't think there's much evidence for it. The main thing is people have kids, and kids take time. Boom 10 years gone from high-performance productive individual-contributor work. It was uncommon for people to go back to school at a later age, but maybe not anymore?

Why’d you censor bullets from a machine gun? Is there some HN autoban for them?

I have never needed to do that sort of memorisation in the past but have done recently. When I was a student my memory was good enough that I could skate through based on what I remembered from lessons/lectures/basic revision. In my professional life I've never needed it.

Recently though I've been learning to fly (in the UK). You have to take some theory exams. The "How the aircraft flies" exam works in the way it has in the past - read through the material a couple of times and because it's a coherent set of knowledge that fits in a framework I already understand (Engineering) I can remember everything. Air Law does not work like that though. There's lots of minutiae to learn (how much visibility do I need for VFR at 5000 feet as supposed to 1000 feet, what does the white ball above the T mean on a signal square). Anki let me learn all of that stuff over a few weeks for 15 mins a day (plus deck creation time - a couple of hours) and pass the exam with no mistakes.

I'm going to shamelessly plug my own emacs org-mode extension: https://github.com/eyeinsky/org-anki

Write all your notes to org-mode files in a git repo, sync these (selectively) to Anki. No need to depend on proprietary services.

Ironically though, the easiest way to get your cards to AnkiDroid/AnkiMobile is through ankiweb.net (a free service) then you could manually export/import cards and stats should that disappear. org-anki saves note ID within org-mode, so you can keep updating cards after an export/import.

Quick question: What's the benefit of this approach vs using org-drill?

org-drill works entirely in emacs (as does org-fc and pamparam) so you'd need to be near a computer when using it (unless you run emacs on your phone).

Presumably Anki’s mobile frontends.

can anyone tell me why anki is implemented so poorly in its core functionality? it works, but its slow, clunky, and error prone. that's the drawback for me and reason i am even willing to check out competition in this tech.

things like deck syncing, card creation, and the general ui all seem like they can be implemented to be much more user centric and functional. For me personally and my girlfriend in med school have lost data due to anki's strange sync pattern.

I can't be the only software engineer that thinks they can think of an implementation in their head that would make anki as a product much easier to deal with, right? As far as I can tell, people are tied to anki due to Stockholm syndrome and lack of worth-it, well maintained alternatives.

It's maintained by a sole developer who competes against goons who rode off the back of his brand name:

https://www.ankiapp.com

To be fair, "anki" (暗記) simply means "memorization" in Japanese so it's hardly super original by itself.

Watching my med student girlfriend use Anki the past few years has been horrible. The syncing in particular is bad, as you pointed out - and bad in a "irreversible data loss" kind of way.

I've thought about trying to create something better, but Anki itself is so entrenched in some communities that there's a strong network effect - both through shared decks and add-ons. (Also, I don't personally have an application for rote memorization, so someone who does would probably create something better.)

I use SyncThing [0] to sync my anki databases between a laptop, desktop and a raspberry pi. Fingers crossed nothing has gone wrong yet, apart from problems such as using incompatible versions on the same db.

[0] https://syncthing.net

Thank you for the suggestion - as a med student, she has an iPad that can access certain medical resources, and is already an iPhone user, so I don't know if SyncThing is really an option for her.

I'm not sure that most users can be expected to figure out things like "does this update include a database upgrade?" "which devices are running an old database?" and "what do I do when the software told me the database on disk is corrupt?"

And I think SyncThing would still suffer from the issue of needing to make sure only one device writes to the Anki sync at a time. I really think some sort of cloud service that handles multi-headed sync of cards/notes (and makes it hard to take permanently destructive actions) would be a real competitor in this space - if they can overcome the Anki network effect.

What issues has she had? I sync between mobile - macbook -pc desktop every day and rarely have any issues, and all of them have been salvageable. This is over maybe 5-6 years of usage at this point.

IIRC, it's basically just that if she leaves Anki up on her Macbook without explicitly syncing & exiting, and then tries to use her iPhone or iPad, she will lose state on one of the devices.

It's a lot of cognitive overhead to remember not to touch Anki on any other devices unless you've synced and closed it out on the most recently used one.

Since she has a ton of cards, syncing takes a while. And occasionally it just throws a random error.

Moreover, there's a sense of fear every time she uses Anki that she will hit the wrong button and lose her expected state.

I suppose remembering to sync is an issue, but I've just built the habit of always syncing when finished. Anki will also sync automatically when you exit (this might be an option you have to enable in the settings).

I totally agree with this, especially the last bit about just the mentality it creates. I wish Anki had an (optional) auto-sync feature (like every 15 mins), but maybe there are too many edge cases for that kind of feature.

I agree that this is annoying, but it's also not too hard to build a habit of syncing after every session. It's 'y' by default.

I haven't had any issues after remembering to do that, but I only really use text-heavy decks and not ones with lots of media.

your comment itself points the huge issue out. the way i see it, as evident in your comment, anki has given you several issue over just the 5-6 years youve used it that requires your to manually salvage your system... what other apps do you do that for?

100% - Anki "does the job" but it has a lot of sharp edges. It's software that users are afraid to use.

Very minor issues. Once every couple months I'll have forgotten to sync from device A after adding cards, do some reps on device B, realize I'm missing cards, and have to go back and resync.

Only a couple times over my entire usage have I actually had to do a full resync, and it's pretty painless. I just reupload to ankiweb, or download from it, and it's done. This is usually because I've caused some incompatibility via add-ons, or anki versions. But it's always been easy to fix.

>what other apps do you do that for?

I'm not sure what other apps I've used nearly as much as anki. Probably just firefox/chrome and emacs. I've had issues with losing tabs in browsers far more often than losing info with anki. And losing data by not saving in an editor is pretty easily done as well. I'm actually surprised at how well anki will handle changes from multiple sources. Unless you modify the same card on different devices, it pretty much always seems to work as expected.

well I'm glad youre having a good time. you can take a look at the rest of the responses on my comment and see that what i said seems to be a common gripe for many

Anki has a lot of features and it's been around forever. It's tough to keep something like that smooth and sleek. But yeah, my original impetus for creating this was loving the idea of Anki, but having a really hard time sticking with it because of how clunky it is.

i agree. i say all these gripes knowing anki isn't some huge corp that can throw money at this problem, but it really is time for a revamp or more competition in the space that is worth moving to.

I'm building an open source Anki clone, and lemme tell you shit's surprisingly hard. Getting syncing working without resorting to uploading entire SQLite databases is nontrivial. You're basically doing multi-master database replication... but you gotta build it yourself (there's no easy way to sync sqlite with some serverside database (ignoring firebase/couchdb/pouchdb for various technical reasons)): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-master_replication

The lack of "worth-it" alternatives is due to the fact that there's no money in this market. Students are very unwilling to buy software, and if you use ads you end up like Quizlet. YC funded a startup in this area (Hickory) and they're... not doing well.

The main reason why everyone still uses Anki despite its issues is because it is still hands-down the best solution out there, despite all the bugs and clunkiness. There are a million and one spaced repetition systems out there, but Anki's plugin system and shared decks make for a very strong network effect.

If you're a med student, I don't recommend moving off Anki. The ecosystem there is too strong. If you're losing data, post in the /r/anki subreddit - Anki automatically generates backups and they'll walk you through restoring them.

I've built my own flashcard app and I ended up just syncing a journal of all your actions on a device (creating/edit cardings, evaluating them) and having all your other devices play those back to get to the "shared state". I store data using SQLite as well. It works pretty well for me.

You're definitely right about students being unwilling to buy software. They're already cash-strapped, so they're very unlikely to pay for an app, let alone a monthly subscription.

Hah - you're describing "event sourcing" and it's the technique I'm using: https://flpvsk.com/blog/2019-07-20-offline-first-apps-event-...

Unfortunately event sourcing means distributed systems... and I'm learning this on the fly on nights & weekends. Martin Kleppmann's "Designing Data Intensive Applications" has put the fear of god in me.

Yup, I'm doing event sourcing.

For my approach, I really just have each device append to its own journal file. I use iCloud's file storage, so I don't even have a service that I run. Each peer device just uploads the latest version of its journal to a shared folder and downloads its peers' journals and plays back the delta as needed.

I intentionally chose this architecture since I didn't want to run my own sync service. It keeps the sync system free, but iCloud can be slow. Unfortunately for me, if iCloud is slow, the app gets blamed for it.

Nice. Just checking, did you not go with firebase/couchdb/pouchdb due to pricing?

Yes. Anything that required me to pay would mean I'd have to charge a subscription from users, which I didn't want to do.

Is there any reason why these apps have to keep the database state locally? Why not just create a web service? The problem with this model would be keeping the server infrastructure running and getting some money to pay the bills, but it looks much simpler.

I also hate that the anki shared decks web site does not encourage collaboration, or at least not the decks I see in their web site. There are a lot of shitty, outdated decks and instead of collaborating to fix them people just upload their own shitty deck. Perhaps the people studying medicine who create decks on their own don't have this problem, but it is something I see in the web site. It would be great to have a site integrated with git so people can collaborate on github.

Also, classification of decks by language is something I miss. When you search for a language, eg. Russian, you get decks for English->Russian, but also for Russian->English. It's hard to find the deck I want

(Just some suggestions, in case someone of working on anki clones)

Are you asking why does an app that is locally installed need to work without internet connection?

If so, consider commuting via subway.

I do get your point but... are you saying you have no reception in subway?

In many cases, yes. But additionally, even with mostly reliable reception people don't want to have to depend on that reception. It's poor form and poor design to include an intermittent service (even if largely reliable for a large portion of your users) as a mandatory component when it is technically unnecessary.

Offline first is simply a more reliable way to build systems than online-only. Specifics long forgotten, but a few years ago (perhaps 10+ now) a lot of people got, understandably, upset when they found out their single player games couldn't be played without an internet connection in order to authenticate. Oops, auth server went down, players can't play the thing they dropped $50+ on.

> Is there any reason why these apps have to keep the database state locally? Why not just create a web service? The problem with this model would be keeping the server infrastructure running and getting some money to pay the bills, but it looks much simpler.

The idea of not having my personal decks stored on my own disk(s) is honestly much worse than the annoyance of sometimes (rarely) running into issues syncing. I've been working on various decks for literally years and have several thousands of cards made. Server-side stored only? Please no.

> I also hate that the anki shared decks web site does not encourage collaboration...

Dude, I'm building exactly this. I'm not basing it on git for various reasons, but I am using event sourcing, and git is basically event sourcing for code. My system will (eventually) allow pull requests, comments, upvotes/downvotes, and all kinds of community shenanigans on flash cards. It's months away from release... but here's the repo if you wanna have a look: https://github.com/dharmaturtle/cardoverflow

You can use Anki in your web browser without storing anything locally. It has some limitations and is not really meant to be your sole use of Anki but you can create and study text based cards.

https://ankiweb.net/about

I've barely used Anki, but I feel like it shouldn't be more than an open spec/format that allows people to make their own compatible clients and services.

It's open source so you can just copy the spec. The community's built a syncing server here: https://github.com/ankicommunity/anki-sync-server

There's also a really interesting templating library that generates cards for Anki: https://closetengine.com/

I'm sure its non trivial, especially if youre building the clone by yourself, but over the time anki has been around, you'd think they wouldve ironed out the kinks. losing data itself isn't the problem. i can get the decks back myself. its the fact the app errors so much that its almost common knowledge to hit up r/anki and get a manual procedure to crawl through backups manually.

i think their mistake is thinking memorization tools are only focused on students and not learners in general. I use anki for memorizing chess positions, learning languages, etc. I'm also a full time worker and have plenty of money to spend on a tools that will help my productivity/hobbies. id be more than happy to fork over cash for the anki system with better client apps. if they had a concern that the cost would put them out of reach of students (their iphone app is $20 so i doubt its a concern), then they should just implement student tier memberships for free while people who can pay will pay.

>its the fact the app errors so much that its almost common knowledge to hit up r/anki and get a manual procedure to crawl through backups manually.

I'm curious what causes this, because I definitely have a different experience from you. Very few errors at all, and I have decks with thousands of cards and hundreds of megabytes of metadata (audio clips, images, etc)

I've rarely encounter bugs in Anki. The ones i have encountered have been the result of me hacking on it in some way. Sure it's hard to use and pretty clunky, but i wouldn't call it buggy.

id beg to differ. i've had plenty of bugs happen myself and you can find tons of posts around the web of people experiencing similar frustrations. I'm sure there are decks that people make that are less error prone when syncing, but that is not my experience with the decks i make.

I think the reason it is where it is is because it was created a long time ago when some of the things we expect today weren't the norm (cloud sync, friendly UX). I think it has such a large user base that it would be very difficult to revamp it without disturbing a lot of users (and add-ons). I think people who use Anki are happy with it as-is, so there's momentum there. And new users who don't like it, well, they don't stick around.

I've written my own spaced repetition flashcard app (see my profile), so I've looked a little bit at how the data is stored in Anki and have a general idea of how sync works, and my impression is sync was bolted onto an existing system meant for a single device. I've seen posts from users in the sub-reddit about how if you do lessons on one device and then do lessons on another, there'll be a conflict in the data and you'll have to manually tell Anki to pick one over the other. (This may have been fixed since, of course.)

i know this motivation all too well in my line of work, but i hate it. its the code conservative approach that will just let things cobweb since people don't hate it enough for anki to change it app dev. granted, anki isn't some corp that has money to throw at this product, but theres such a high demand for this app to be better and it just isn't and people are just okay with it because its the best they have.

> it works, but its slow, clunky, and error prone.

Interesting assessment. I use it almost daily, and I have no issue with it whatsoever (macOS <-> iOS <-> iPadOS). Sync works absolutely flawless. UI is not modern and it's a bit slow with Rosetta, but stable and fast enough to add and edit cards. Copy and paste of images works ... stats are okay. And, the most important part, the algorithm just works well for me.

tl;dr: I love it.

i have no complaints on the memorization system itself. it works and thats why i will continue to use anki despite my gripes with it. i do not agree that syncing is flawless though since i've had many major issues in the past. i imagine there are plenty that do not have issues depending on what they're studying and the contents of the decks they make, but that is not what i've experienced.

Maybe I've just internalized how to use Anki in a way that works well and avoid it's pitfalls, but what are the actual problems you have with it?

just what i've said in the post. deck syncing is error prone, card creation can be tedious and unintuitive for most, and general ui is dated among other issues.

>deck syncing is error prone

I suppose making it manual might not be ideal, but errors are very few and far between.

>general ui is dated

I don't really know what this means. Why change something that works just because it's stayed the same for a while?

surprised to hear you think the GUI is fine. I've been using it for a year, and I know my way around the app & menus by now, but I still struggle on occasion, as things are just not intuitively laid out and/or not well-presented.

Oh, well everyday usage is totally fine (reviewing cards, adding cards), but some things are still a little weird, card types vs note types for example, but that comes up rarely enough that it doesn't bother me.

Maybe I'm just tired of apps that get more and more bloated and slower year after year, while the ui gets changed to "simplify" things and become less usable as a result.

But anki has mostly stayed the same, it's fast, responsive, does what I need it to do, almost never crashes, etc. It's also been a daily routine to use for literally years, so it's sort of soothing. Yeah it has some rough edges, but they don't come up very often.

I had the same thought and created my own implementation [0]. As another user said it's surprisingly difficult, and Anki is incredibly extensible, so it can be difficult to fill everyone's need.

What I've noticed is that a lot of the power users and influencers are very much invested in Anki, which makes it difficult to get them to check out your alternative. And because these are the type of users that are promoting Anki, it has gained a lot of mindshare in this space.

That said, the people that have found my app are very grateful it exists as an alternative to Anki.

As far as the syncing, as another user said, it is actually quite difficult. There just are not a lot of options out there for this kind of use case. Anki's syncing is custom-built.

[0] https://mochi.cards/

"21st Night attaches your notes and flashcards to the source you originally got them from"

This seems to be the main thing that might differentiate this program from Anki (other than the specially made decks for particular subjects, which could also be a big thing). This seems to be done, based on the demo deck, with tagging? This being an important differentiating factor, if possible it might be good if the example decks had more detailed contextual links rather than having just "from textbook" (without indicating which textbook) or "from life".

If there was a more clean explanation of the differences between your software and other similar products it might be helpful.

That’s already possible with Anki, even without Addons. Just add a new field source to your card deck

All my Anki note types have a field `HiddenNotes` which is never displayed on any cards. In addition to adding information when the card is created, I can also go back and add something to the field while reviewing in Ankidroid.

Not, not just tagging.

Try creating a note, then highlighting a phrase from that note. You'll see that you have the ability to create a card from that phrase, which will then be attached to that note. The next time you pull up that note, you'll be able to see the card and vice-versa.

You can also see attached cards and notes side-by-side if you prefer working that way.

Doesn't remnote have this functionality? Their main focus seems to be creating flashcards from your notes.

This app looks pretty good. There's also RemNote [1] which serves a similar function. It's kind of like Roam + Anki all in one.

I'm really loving the proliferation of good new ideas for note-taking and memorization. I wish I had some of these tools when I was in school. Even if some of them are paid right now, it's only a matter of time before solid free and open-source competition emerges. I'd love to see some Anki-like tools for Athens [2].

[1] https://www.remnote.io/pricing/feature_chart [2] https://github.com/athensresearch/athens

It's pretty straight forward to integrate anki with almost any tool. For example I use it with tiddlywiki (see https://kebifurai.github.io/TiddlyResearch/ for an example setup).

How does it relate to TiddlyRemember?

Author of TiddlyRemember here.

TiddlyRemember is a plugin for TiddlyWiki with an associated plugin for Anki. TiddlyResearch is a version of TiddlyWiki that comes bundled with the TiddlyRemember TiddlyWiki plugin.

Thanks! Yeah, Remnote is also really cool and a great product.

Mochi [0] is another. It is markdown driven with bi-directional links between cards. Templates. Local-first + syncing, and a bunch more. (Also, I made it.)

[0] https://mochi.cards/

So basically the same features as Anki except it's paid?

Anki is paid too. ($25 for the mobile app.)

Only on iOS. Anki is free on Android.

free and open source on desktop, web and Android

This is not correct. The web version of Anki is free to use but is closed-source.

true! sorry for my lazy wording

I use AnkiDroid from Fdroid. https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.ichi2.anki/

Nope! A lot of features Anki doesn't have. Try out the demo account and let me know what you think.

What kind of features? Is there a comparision page?

What I really want is templating.

Like, the word 暗記 consists of two characters. I’d love to get my notes on each of those characters readily available and updateable when I review that word.

Huh, not entirely sure what you mean. When you say readily available and updateable, what are you hoping to accomplish?

Having access to the notes you had written for each of the characters (provided the deck owner wrote that word card by including the cards of each character).

I hope to be able to update my note on either of the characters such that it will propagate to all cards that contain either character.

You can do this in Mochi (https://mochi.cards/).

Very very nice! Despite I don't feel like I understand the context stuff (because not enough useful examples, i.e. not a single example card having context?) nor why would I need notes (are they essentially no answer flashcards?) this seems the first flashcard app I like. Easy to add a card, easy to retire a card, nice-looking.

How do I run through the cards one by one (rather than view a whole deck)? How do I force it to re-show cards I've already solved today?

Does this app provide offline storage or cloud storage? I don't want to guess but it was not very evident on your product page.

The thing I really like about Anki is I can create a separate profile to store cards related to say private confidential knowledge at workplace and I won't sync that profile so those cards stay just there encrypted on my office laptop. Hence offline storage is critical.

Cloud storage. I didn't expect people to use this for confidential knowledge, to be honest.

Periodically I get inspired to create an Anki deck (or several) for some stuff at work and share it around; I bounce off it because I'm not sure about updates. In particular, I don't think there's a way to mark cards as deserving deletion on re-import of a deck? Does anyone know of a way to do that with Anki, or of similar software (this?) with such a feature?

You should also check out IDoRecall[1]. It's a great alternative and has the possibility to create recalls out of notes, too.

[1] https://www.idorecall.com/

(NB: I am not the creator, nor am I being paid to promote it. Just a regular user who found it particularly useful for my studies and personal knowledge.)

Anki is free though..

I'm not sure why I'd use this when there are tons of free and feature-rich alternatives to pick from. I might consider it if I could buy a perpetual license, but I'm not about to drop $5/month on a... studying app.

I find these types of comments interesting. It shows just how much VC money has distorted the value of software.

Google/Facebook/etc all provide amazing software to us for free. Because they had hundreds of millions raised from investors to give away value while the businesses figured out how to build a business.

Yes I agree that the unique value prop for this is a little muddy compared to other apps. But at the heart, if a student’s gpa is going to improve from use of this then yeh that’s clearly worth $5/mth, and should be a no brainer to purchase.

I don't think the VC money distorted anything. People are not opposed to paying for what they are using. People are opposed to paying monthly.

FYI the screenshot of the app has the formula:

Revenue = Profit - Loss

It should be:

Revenue = Profit + Loss (as Profit = Revenue - Loss).

Otherwise, cool!

I think the nonprogrammer view would be that "loss" is a positive number, then the original format is correct

Ah, could be.

Revenue is bigger than profit, so it’s worse than that. I think it’s just plain wrong, or it assumes loss is a negative number.

Oh man, you are correct. Shoot. I don't know how I did that.

This is a crowded space. Since you're charging a subscription, you 100% need a comparison table so we can determine exactly how your product distinguishes itself from the dozens of others (anki, quizlet, etc).

I use ForgetMeNot and its super helpful and even better than Anki in some ways. So, made a switch. Best is that its open source.

Is this OSS?

If not, then there are a dozen (also non-OSS) alternatives one could choose from.

Please name one

I'm not sure that there's a dozen, but one very well-known one is the third word of the post title. :)

Tiddlywiki is Open Source and has an Anki plugin (TiddlyRemember)

org-mode with org-fc for spaced repetition

https://github.com/burtonator/polar-bookshelf https://github.com/Yvee1/hascard https://github.com/amy6/delern

and anki

https://mnemosyne-proj.org/ - The Mnemosyne Project

Leitner Box. Syncing kind of sucks though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leitner_system

It's not OSS, no. OSS is a tough business model for small SAAS.

And there are alternatives, but none of them work quite as well for the intended use case. It's possible to hack Anki for most of the functionality of 21st Night, but that gets tedious, especially for people who just want something that works out of the box.

No repo link? Anki has theirs on the front page.

It looks like proprietary software. To claim to be an alternative for Anki it would have to be free software at least.

Well, it's an alternative for people who are looking for interesting, useful flashcard apps and found Anki limited or hard to use. Would you say Windows isn't an alternative for Linux?

No, it should at least mention "a paid alternative". E.g. one would say LibreOficce is a FREE alternative to MS.

Anki already is an alternative to SuperMemo, so a proprietary alternative to Anki doesn't make sense unless it somehow improves over SuperMemo.

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