concards

Turning notes into flashcards, or should I say concards! Concards is my ongoing attempt to make flashcards simple and easily embeddable into text document based notes. Concards is much lighter than other flashcard applications such as such as Anki or Memrise, but it is also very powerful striving to do one thing and do it well.

Features

• Implements a repetition algorithm similar to SM2.
• Reading from multiple files & directories.
• Conveniently edit cards while reviewing them!
• Helpful syntax for adding reversible cards.
• Built with Unicode in mind!
• Undoing/Redoing support.

Install

Download the latest binary executable from the release page. At the moment, only Linux and Mac are supported.

Building From Source

It should be super simple:

go install github.com/alanxoc3/concards

Dependencies

This project currently depends on:

• stretchr/testify for unit tests.
• alanxoc3/argparse forked from akamensky/argparse for CLI options.
• nsf/termbox-go for the terminal gui.
• mattn/go-runewidth to help with Asian characters.

Concards wouldn't be where it is today without those open source projects & their contributors, so please check them out too!

Usage

The complete syntax of embedding your flashcards into text documents consists of these symbols:

'@>' = Starts a concards block and also starts a question.
'|'  = Separates sides.
':'  = Separates sides, and adds a reversed card.
'<@' = Ends the concards block.
'\'  = Escapes the special tokens above.

Here are a few example concards:

@> Concards
 : A lightweight embeddable note-taking flashcard program.

@> What does "concards" stand for?
 | Console Cards

@> What does the ":" do in concards?
 | It will add an extra card where the "colon" side is the question and the
   question is the answer.
 | This syntax is especially useful for vocabulary when learning a language and
   can save typing.

@> Can a concard have more than 2 sides?
 | Yes

@> What does a concard look like?
 | \@> It could look like this \| What does a concard look like? \<@
 | \@> It could also look like this \| with multiple \| answers! \<@

@> How do you escape a concard keyword?
 | Put a backslash before it. Your text file would show "\@>", but the app shows "@>".

@> How do you show a backslash then a keyword in the concards ui?
 | To see \\@> in the ui, your text document must have 2 backslashes: \\\@>

@> 你好世界
 : Hello World
 : Greetings World

@> The human who created concards.
 : Alan Morgan
<@

The easiest way to understand that syntax is by trying it out! Just run concards on this README.md file and see what happens!

$ concards README.md

Advanced Usage

The Predict File

The predict file contains information needed to make a prediction when you should review a card next.

Here is an example predict file:

002141b9b9448a257b05da1f2eb78972 2020-08-08T18:00:17Z 2020-08-02T18:00:17Z 2 1 1 sm2
3dda75cb44ed447186834541475f32e2 2020-08-08T18:00:17Z 2020-08-02T18:00:17Z 1 3 -2 sm2

Here is that same file, but annotated:

sha256sum cut in half            | next timestamp       | previous timestamp   | total yes count | total no count | current streak | spaced repetition algorithm used
---------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+---+---+----+----
002141b9b9448a257b05da1f2eb78972 | 2020-08-08T18:00:17Z | 2020-08-02T18:00:17Z | 2 | 1 |  1 | sm2
3dda75cb44ed447186834541475f32e2 | 2020-08-08T18:00:17Z | 2020-08-02T18:00:17Z | 1 | 3 | -2 | sm2

This file is read from $CONCARDS_PREDICT, or $HOME/.config/concards/predict if that environment variable doesn't exist.

The Outcome File

The outcome file contains the historical outcomes of every time a card has been passed off or failed. It differs only slightly from the predict file. Here is the corresponding outcome file for the predict file example above:

002141b9b9448a257b05da1f2eb78972 2020-08-08T18:00:17Z 2020-08-02T18:00:17Z 0 0 0 0
002141b9b9448a257b05da1f2eb78972 2020-08-08T18:00:17Z 2020-08-02T18:00:17Z 0 1 -1 1
002141b9b9448a257b05da1f2eb78972 2020-08-08T18:00:17Z 2020-08-02T18:00:17Z 1 1 0 1
3dda75cb44ed447186834541475f32e2 2020-08-08T18:00:17Z 2020-08-02T18:00:17Z 0 0 0 1
3dda75cb44ed447186834541475f32e2 2020-08-08T18:00:17Z 2020-08-02T18:00:17Z 1 0 1 0
3dda75cb44ed447186834541475f32e2 2020-08-08T18:00:17Z 2020-08-02T18:00:17Z 1 1 0 0
3dda75cb44ed447186834541475f32e2 2020-08-08T18:00:17Z 2020-08-02T18:00:17Z 1 2 -1 0

You can notice that there are two main differences from the predict file:

• There are usually multiple lines with the same hash.
• The last column is a boolean "pass or fail" instead of an algorithm name.

This file is read from $CONCARDS_OUTCOME, or $HOME/.config/concards/outcome if that environment variable doesn't exist.