I have a post in the queue that discusses spaced repetition and how to use Anki to realize it. Emacs, of course, has org-drill, which by all reports is an excellent implementation of spaced repetition but suffers from not being portable to smart phones and iPads. Still, who wants to have to use Anki’s editor for making cards when we Emacsers hate to do any text editing outside of our favorite editor.
Fortunately, Emacs has us covered as usual. There’s a package called anki-editor that lets us compose Anki flash cards in Org mode and import then into Anki. I’ve written about this before but Rohit Goswami has a recent post that considers using anki-editor with Doom.
Using Anki with anki-editor seems to me to be the best of two worlds. On the one hand, creating Anki cards can be accomplished in Emacs, which we consider the ideal—or, perhaps, the only acceptable—environment for performing text editing tasks. On the other hand, Anki is portable to and syncs between our laptops and our mobile devices. Most of us—modulo the pandemic—spend a lot of time traveling on buses, trains, or taxis or standing in line somewhere like the DMV, the bank, or the grocery store. That’s the perfect time to pull up your Anki deck and do a little spaced repetition.
The question remains as to why you should bother. I’ll cover that in my upcoming post on Anki and augmenting your long-term memory.