anki-editor – An Emacs minor mode for making Anki cards with Org

Since I’m not a native English speaker, feel free to correct me if there are any ambiguity or grammatical mistakes ;-)

Installation

Requirements

AnkiConnect, an Anki add-on required by this package to interact with Anki
curl

If you have MELPA in your package-archives, just M-x package-install RET anki-editor RET, or install it manually by downloading and visiting anki-editor.el in your emacs buffer, and M-x package-install-from-buffer RET.

Usage

The Layout of Notes

The power of this mode comes from the builtin HTML export backend provided by Org, which enables you to use almost all the Org constructs for writing Anki notes: lists, code blocks, tables, latex and so on.

The structure of a note is as follows, which is inspired by org-drill. Check out examples.org for more examples.

* Raining                                                      :vocab:idioms:
  :PROPERTIES:
  :ANKI_DECK: English
  :ANKI_NOTE_TYPE: Basic (and reversed card)
  :ANKI_TAGS: vocab idioms
  :END:
** Front
   (it's) raining cats and dogs
** Back
   it's raining very hard

Anki deck is provided by ANKI_DECK property. This property is retrieved with inheritance, that is to say, it can be put in any ancestor entries or at top of the file by #+PROPERTY: ANKI_DECK DeckName.
ANKI_NOTE_TYPE property is to specify the Anki note type of a note and is also required for identifying an Anki note entry.
Anki tags can be provided in two ways:
1. With a ANKI_TAGS property, multiple tags are separated by spaces
2. With Org tags [fn:1], this could be turned off if you would like to keep Org tags separated from Anki tags
Child entries of a note entry are fields.

Typing all these information by hand could be inefficient and prone to errors, so this package provides an interactive command anki-editor-insert-note to help with this and hooks up auto-completions for decks, note types and tags etc.

Commands

Command	Description
anki-editor-mode	Toggle this minor mode.
anki-editor-push-notes	Push notes to Anki. Additional arguments can be used to restrict the range of notes.
anki-editor-push-new-notes	Similar to `anki-editor-push-notes`, but push those that are without `ANKI_NOTE_ID`.
anki-editor-retry-failed-notes	Similar to `anki-editor-push-notes`, except that it only pushes notes with `ANKI_FAILURE_REASON`.
anki-editor-insert-note	Insert a note entry like `M-RET`, interactively. When note heading is not provided or is blank, it’s used as the first field.
anki-editor-delete-notes	Delete notes or the note at point.
anki-editor-cloze-dwim	Cloze current active region or a word the under the cursor.
anki-editor-export-subtree-to-html	Export the subtree at point to HTML.
anki-editor-convert-region-to-html	Convert and replace region to HTML.
anki-editor-api-check	Check if correct version of AnkiConnect is running.
anki-editor-sync-collections	Synchronize your local anki collection.
anki-editor-gui-browse	Open Anki Browser with a query for current note or deck.
anki-editor-gui-add-cards	Open Anki Add Cards dialog with presets from current note entry.

Variables

Name	Default Value	Description
anki-editor-api-host	“127.0.0.1”	The network address AnkiConnect is listening.
anki-editor-api-port	“8765”	The port number AnkiConnect is listening.
anki-editor-break-consecutive-braces-in-latex	nil	If non-nil, consecutive “}” will be automatically separated by spaces to prevent early-closing of cloze.
anki-editor-ignored-org-tags	’(“export” “noexport”)	A list of Org tags that are ignored when constructing notes form entries.
anki-editor-org-tags-as-anki-tags	t	If nil, tags of entries wont’t be counted as Anki tags.
anki-editor-protected-tags	’(“marked” “leech”)	A list of tags that won’t be deleted from Anki even though they’re absent in Org entries.
anki-editor-latex-style	builtin	The style of latex to translate into.
anki-editor-include-default-style	t	Wheter or not to include `org-html-style-default’ when using `anki-editor-copy-styles’.
anki-editor-html-head	nil	Additional html tags to append to card stylings when using `anki-editor-copy-styles’.
anki-editor-note-match	nil	Additional matching string for mapping through anki note headings.

Functions and Macros

anki-editor-map-note-entries

Simple wrapper that calls org-map-entries with ~&ANKI_NOTE_TYPE<>""~ appended to MATCH.

anki-editor-api-call

Invoke AnkiConnect with ACTION and PARAMS.

anki-editor-api-call-result

Calls above, returns result field or raise an error.

anki-editor-api-with-multi

Used in combination with anki-editor-api-enqueue to queue multiple api calls and combine them into one ‘multi’ call at the end, return the results of these calls in the same order.

Usage:

(cl-destructuring-bind (decks models tags notes)
    (anki-editor-api-with-multi
     ;; The following api calls will be combined into one 'multi' call.
     (anki-editor-api-enqueue 'deckNames)
     (anki-editor-api-enqueue 'modelNames)
     (anki-editor-api-enqueue 'getTags)
     (anki-editor-api-enqueue 'findNotes :query "deck:Default"))
  (message (concat "decks: %S\n"
                   "models: %S\n"
                   "tags: %S\n"
                   "notes: %S")
           decks models tags notes))

anki-editor-api-enqueue

Like anki-editor-api-call, but is only used in combination with anki-editor-api-with-multi. Instead of sending the request directly, it simply queues the request.

anki-editor-note-at-point

Make a note struct from current entry.

anki-editor-find-notes

Find notes with QUERY.

anki-editor-copy-styles

Copy `org-html-style-default’ and `anki-editor-html-head’ to Anki card stylings.

anki-editor-remove-styles

Remove from card stylings html tags generated by this mode.

Limitations

Tags between Anki and Org

Because the set of characters allowed in tags is different between Anki and Org, you have to make sure that tags from Anki are compatible with Org and tags in Org could be recognized by Anki.

Working with Anki add-ons

This package might not work well with certain Anki add-ons especially those who extend the builtin Anki note editor to automatically fill note field content (e.g. Add note id).

Demo

Donation

This package was a set of utilities in my personal .emacs, then I thought it might be helpful to others, so I decided to make it a package and share with you guys. Since then I have been devoting part of my free time to the maintenance of this package.

Donation is not required, but if you like my work and want to show your appreciation you can donate via PayPal, every cent is appreciated, thanks for your support :)

[fn:1] It should be noted that Org only allows letters, numbers, _ and @ in a tag but Anki allows more, so you may have to edit you Anki tags before they can be used in Org without any surprise.

jeffalstott / anki-editor