Anki Desk

Write flashcards in your notes; review them in Anki.

• Incremental, bounded sync. Only card files are read: notes in your card folders, or notes with anki-deck: in their frontmatter. The vault is never scanned, and progress is saved after every batch, so a large vault costs the same as its card files.
• Card templates as commands. New card: Basic, Cloze, Sequence, Discriminating pair, Predict the output, Explain it, plus your own templates from one note. Every card opens as a draft you can edit, with gentle quality checks, before it's inserted.
• Maths that survives. $…$ and $$…$$ become Anki's \(…\) and \[…\] with a real tokenizer: dollars in code are never maths, and $p = $ can't swallow the rest of the card.
• A calm study dashboard. Today in minutes, bounded sessions, and a gentle restart after time away (below).
• Never deletes. A card you remove from your notes is tagged bridge::orphan in Anki, not deleted.
• Compatible with Obsidian_to_Anki files. The same START/END block syntax and <!--ID: …--> markers. Existing notes are adopted with their review history intact.

Study dashboard

Open it from the ribbon (layers icon) or the command Open study dashboard.

• Today, in minutes. Each deck shows roughly how long its cards will take, timed from your own recent reviews, rather than a count that says nothing about effort.
• Bounded sessions. "10 min" or "20 cards" opens Anki's reviewer on that deck and tracks progress here. When you reach the end you get a gentle notice, not a forced stop (unless you turn that on).
• Coming back after a break. After three or more days away, the first thing you see is a small plan (start with ten minutes on one deck), not the size of the backlog. You can also pause new cards with one click; it shows exactly which Anki presets change, and Resume puts them back.
• Cards to rewrite. Leeches are listed with a link to the note they came from.
• Own-time decks. Decks you list in settings (for example Languages) appear in their own section and are never added to the day's total.

The dashboard only talks to Anki while it is visible.

Card syntax

TARGET DECK: Biology::Cells
START
Bridge Basic
Front: What sets the resting membrane potential?
Back: Mostly K⁺ leak through open channels, with the Na⁺/K⁺-ATPase keeping gradients.
Tags: physiology
END

Note types (named "Bridge" because each one bridges a card and its note): Bridge Basic (Front, Back), Bridge Cloze (Text, Back Extra), Bridge Type (Front, typed Back). The legacy names Basic, Cloze and Basic (type in the answer) are read as these. Every Bridge note type also carries Context (a breadcrumb, shown small above the question) and Source (a link back to the note, shown under the answer). Both are generated.

Your own templates

Put fenced blocks in the note named in settings (default Anki Desk Templates.md):

```anki-template
id: drug
label: Drug card
type: Bridge Basic
Front: {{selection.firstLine}}: mechanism, key adverse effects, one interaction?
Back: {{selection.rest}}
tags: pharm
```

Placeholders: {{selection}}, {{selection.firstLine}}, {{selection.rest}}, {{heading}}, {{note}}, {{deck}}. A template with a built-in id replaces the built-in.

For plugin developers

Other plugins can read today's study load and open Anki Desk's card draft through a small, versioned API. Copy src/api-types.ts into your plugin:

import { getAnkiDeskApi } from "./anki-desk-api";

const desk = getAnkiDeskApi(this.app); // null if missing, disabled or another major version
const today = await desk?.dueToday();  // { decks: [{ deck, label, minutes, … }], totalMinutes } or null if Anki is closed
desk?.draftCard({ templateId: "cloze", selection: text, note: file.basename, deck: "Biology::Cells" }, (block) => editor.replaceSelection(block));

apiVersion follows semver: minor versions only add.

Requirements and disclosures

• Desktop Anki with the AnkiConnect add-on. Syncing is desktop-only; writing cards works on mobile and syncs next time.
• Network: the plugin talks only to AnkiConnect on your own computer (http://127.0.0.1:8765 by default). Nothing is sent anywhere else. No telemetry.
• Writes to your vault only to insert <!--ID: …--> markers into card blocks it has just created in Anki, and only if the file hasn't changed since it was read.

Development

npm install
npm test          # pure core, including a synthetic 8,640-note vault performance test
npm run build     # main.js
npm run cli -- --vault "/path/to/vault"            # preview sync outside Obsidian
npm run cli -- --vault "/path/to/vault" --apply    # sync outside Obsidian

MIT licence.