Beyond Anki: Leveraging Markdown and CLI for Long-Term Memory

eudoxia0/hashcards

Hashcards is a fantastic example of this. It’s a plain-text-based Spaced Repetition System (SRS). If you’ve ever used Anki but felt it was too bulky or hated the UI, Hashcards will feel like a breath of fresh air. It treats your learning data just like code.

Here is a breakdown of why it’s useful for engineers and how you can get started.

From a developer's perspective, Hashcards offers several "quality of life" benefits

Version Control
Since cards are just text files, you can keep your flashcards in a Git repository. You get history, diffs, and syncing for free.

Markdown Friendly
You can use your favorite text editor (VS Code, Vim, Obsidian) to write your cards. No clunky forms or database entries.

Automation
You can easily write scripts to generate cards from your codebase, documentation, or even your shell history.

Low Friction
There is no proprietary format. Your knowledge is "future-proof" because it’s just strings in a file.

Spaced Repetition works by showing you information just as you are about to forget it. Hashcards manages the intervals based on your performance.

Hashcards is written in Rust, so it’s incredibly fast. You can install it via cargo (the Rust package manager).

# Install hashcards using cargo
cargo install hashcards

Once installed, you can initialize a directory to start tracking your learning progress.

In Hashcards, a deck is simply a .md (Markdown) or .txt file. You define a card using a specific syntax (usually # for the question and the lines following it for the answer).

# What is the Big O complexity of searching a Hash Map?
Average case is O(1). Worst case is O(n) if there are many collisions.

# How do you create a symbolic link in Linux?
ln -s /path/to/target /path/to/link

# What does 'Idempotent' mean in the context of APIs?
It means that making the same request multiple times has the same 
effect as making it once.

To start a study session, you simply run the command in your terminal pointing to your file

hashcards programming.md

The Workflow

The terminal displays the Question.

You think of the answer and press a key to Reveal.

You grade yourself (e.g., 1 for "Hard", 3 for "Easy").

Hashcards updates the metadata (hidden in the file or a sidecar file) to schedule the next review.

Hashcards often saves your progress using small metadata tags. This allows the system to know when to show you the card again without ruining the readability of your text file. It might look something like this after a session

# What is a Closure? A function that remembers its outer variables even after the outer function has returned.

This tool is perfect if you want to memorize things like new API syntax, architectural patterns, or CLI flags without leaving your terminal environment.