Flashcards

Pasting a list is the fast way in

Nobody types a hundred cards one at a time, which is why most flashcard tools are abandoned after eight. Paste two columns from a spreadsheet, a document, or another app, and you have a deck.

The separator is worked out rather than asked about, because nobody can answer that question about their own clipboard. It is scored on how many lines split into exactly two parts, counting occurrences instead picks the comma for a list full of answers like "Paris, the capital", and splits every card in the wrong place. The preview shows the first card before you commit, so a wrong guess is visible rather than discovered later.

Leitner: why the same cards keep coming back

Five boxes. A card you get right moves up one and is not shown again for longer; a card you get wrong drops straight back to the first and returns within the session. The effect is that your time goes to the cards you do not know, which is the single thing that makes spaced repetition work and that showing a deck in order fails to do.

The intervals are same-day, one day, three, seven, and twenty-one. A card in the last box is one you have got right five times running with gaps in between, which is about as close to "learned" as a card gets.

Printing, and the thing nothing gets right

Print a deck double-sided and the sheet flips along its vertical edge. That means the answer for the card in the top-left has to be printed in the top-right of the answer page, otherwise every card comes out with its neighbour's back, which you discover after cutting them all up.

The answer pages here are mirrored to account for it, including a short last page, which is padded so its single card still lands opposite itself. Four layouts, from two index cards a page to ten.

Getting the deck out again

CSV for a spreadsheet, tab-separated for Anki and Quizlet, JSON if you want the box numbers and stars as well. A deck locked inside a tool is a deck you will rebuild somewhere else rather than move, so all four are one click.

Where the decks are kept

In this browser, on this device. No account, nothing uploaded, and it works offline. The trade is the same as everywhere else on this site: they are not on your phone, and clearing site data clears them. Export anything you would mind losing.