Adding flashcards to your digital garden (with org-roam and Anki)

Given I'm using org-mode and org-roam for my Wiki, I could use one of the native flashcards systems - e.g. org-fc, pamparam, or org-drill.

But I'm most likely to do the flashcards on my phone, not at my desktop, and none of them will work with orgzly.

So, Anki is a piece of software that will be work for this. I've used Anki it on and off in the past - it's a libre software tool for flashcards that uses spaced repetition. There's a cross-platform desktop version, a web version, and mobile apps, so you can do it in a bunch of places.

I could see from a screenshot at https://www.orgroam.com that someone was using some kind of Anki system with org-roam - I asked in the forum, and the tool in question is anki-editor.

So I set that up - notes on how below. It's worth noting that anki-editor is an org-mode thing, not org-roam specific, but as I'm trying to mix my flashcards and my org-roam zettelkasten-ish personal wiki, I'll probably have more of an org-roam slant here.

First you'll need Anki. You can get it from the site, but as I'm on Ubuntu I just went for it straight from the repos.

sudo apt install anki

AnkiConnect is an Anki extension that lets external apps interact with Anki - for example, creating cards in your decks.

I followed the installation instructions and all worked fine. I wasn't prompted to restart Anki like it said I would be, but I checked http://localhost:8765/ and it looked fine.

anki-editor is the Emacs extension that let's you push your cards from your org files into your Anki decks. It's on Melpa, so you can just install it however you would usually do so in your flavour of Emacs. I'm using spacemacs, so I added anki-editor in to dotspacemacs-additional-packages in my .spacemacs and gave everything a refresh with SPC f e R.

Now you can create flashcards in your org files, and push them to Anki via AnkiConnect.

anki-editor-insert-note will create a new flashcard. Here's an example.

Then anki-editor-push-notes will push it to Anki.

Some things it might be nice to improve:

• I feel like I'm maintaining the flashcards separately from the body of my notes - it's a bit of a duplication of effort. It'd be good to get a flow where the flashcard is just part of the note as is, and I can pull it out without duplicating it.
• I've only been pushing one flashcard at a time at the moment, when the buffer is open. I'll probably add a Make step that iterates all my notes and publishes flashcards if found.
• My flashcards are (probably?) noise that I don't want added to my published digital garden - perhaps they should be filtered out of the publish site.

I've now got a fairly simple flow for making flashcards from my wiki notes. I'm hoping this will have a dual purpose of helping me to memorise the things that I'm learning and thinking about, and will also prompt me to regularly tend to my wiki.

I'm sure I'll follow up with notes soon on how this is all working out.