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Ask HN: File based note taking with spaced repetition?

by mcbetz on 5/8/17, 1:53 PM with 7 comments

Text files based note taking has been my prefered way to manage knowledge for several years. NVAlt and markdown files have been a great combination.

As I am also writing technical notes (for example when learning a new programming language or framework) I wish I could combine the file based notes with spaced repetition (similar to Anki).

Does anyone know a system where I can combine the two features (simple text note taking and spaced repetition)?

  • by fsavard on 5/8/17, 7:47 PM

    There certainly is, I coded one myself, but I never made any effort to publicize it.

    http://www.fsavard.com/flow/2012/12/diff-revision/

    Basically you take notes like you normally would and the "diffs" of your notes become the elements you will review using spaced-repetition style intervals.

    Drawbacks:

    - It's not exactly user friendly in its current implementation.

    - There isn't any way to give yourself a grade based on how well you remembered a piece of information.

    - You must take care to write notes in small blurbs before running the "diff" command, otherwise I end up with large chunks of text to revise and I won't review properly.

    - The lack of question-answer mechanism pretty much bypasses the whole "active recall" principle, or whatever that was called.

    (Edit: spacing.)

  • by davelnewton on 5/8/17, 2:27 PM

    Note that spaced repetition is pretty easy to implement; if your notes are in J Random Format you'd need to munge them anyway.
  • by givemefive on 5/8/17, 2:14 PM

    whats wrong with anki again?