Flashcards CLI 2.0 Released
March 10, 2021
A little less than a year ago I was looking for a flashcards command-line interface, mainly so I could help myself memorize various Vim commands. Though I'd previously used AnkiWeb for studying, I wanted a CLI because I spend much of my time in the terminal and I wanted to be able to quickly add a new "card" and then jump back to whatever I was doing.
I primarily program in Python, so I tried out two or three different CLIs that I found on PyPI. One was broken on installation (at least with Python 3), and someone else had already raised an issue on GitHub a few months before with the same problem I had. It looked like a very easy fix so I forked the project and submitted a pull request. I didn't get a response, but I liked the interface so I started to use my version of it, and meanwhile poked around the code more. I found some areas that could be simplified, and then more and more kept appearing. Soon I was gutting most of the object-oriented code in favor of a more structural approach. Between that, switching from unittest to pytest, adding more features, and moving from file-based storage to a database, there's not a whole lot of the code I started with left.
Going from file-based storage to an sqlite database was a breaking change (and what necessitated version 2.0), but I think it was a good decision. It was prompted by sqlite repeatedly popping up lately, but also by my desire to make "reversible" cards, so that either the "question" or "answer" could appear before the other during a study session, rather than always question-then-answer. That latter part would have required some structural change within the files, and I felt like they were already cumbersome to work with. Switching to a database would not only allow me to further simplify the codebase, but also make it easier to continue to evolve features.
I doubt that anyone aside from myself had been using my version of flashcards 1.x, but just in case — and because I needed to do it for myself anyway — v2.0 (but not >= v2.1) includes a command to convert to the new format. I still have some plans for improvements, but I somewhat doubt that there will ever be a version 3.0.
Try it out if you're looking to memorize some things and like the command line!
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