Card browser, preview and filter

This is more like an umbrella feature request with the overall goal to have better means to access, control and get insights from the flashcards generated by RemNote. The so called /cards option available right now is almost useless. I think we need at least three components to have better control over cards

  1. Card browser
  • A way to list all the cards in tabular format with useful columns like last review date, next review date, average time spent on the card so far, number of forgot responses, enabled or not etc. Something close to this existing Feature Request
  • A way to sort this cards table based on any of these columns
  • a way to browse all the cards in the knowledge base and also a way to browse cards only from a specific document (more explanation in Filter section)
  1. Card previewer
  • A way to just go through the cards in the browser as if one is reviewing them and a way to just move through the cards without reviewing or if there is a need, a way to give review response on a card (e.g. while just browsing through the cards I realized that I am not able to recollect one card, so I want to mark it as forgotten). Something close to this feedback from Martin in this thread
  • This will enable many use cases like ’ practice cards in top down order from a document’, ‘to get a feel for your retention on all the cards in a document before an exam’, ‘skim through newly created cards and make sure that there are no typos or mistakes before the actual review session’ etc.
  1. Card filter
  • A way to get useful insights from cards. One use case of this is mentioned here.
    Here are a few other use cases
  • Filter all the cards with ease below 2.15
  • Filter all the cards having ‘forgot’ percentage greater than some value
  • Filter all the cards with average time per review above 45 seconds
  • Filter all the cards created today, this week, this month
  • Filter all the cards due tomorrow, next week
  • Filter all the cards from xyz document and got reviewed in the last 1 week
  • A filter option can even be used to uncover buggy cards that are not getting reviewed properly because of RemNote bugs

Implementation

  1. Maybe expand the existing cards feature and make it powerful?
  2. Combine Search portals with Queries that can also handle cards?

Yes, exactly. Allow me to borrow some terminology from the anki world that is applicable here since it describes phenomenon common to all SRS algorithms. The card browser & filtering helps solve the problem of “ease hell” and leaches, which is my greatest worry of using remnote long term, especially as the number of the cards increase.

For those who don’t know, leaches are cards that failed repeatedly despite numerous attempts to relearn them. They are a red flag signaling that either you didn’t understand the card in the first place or that the card is poorly designed. Ease hell is a phenomenon that occurs with cards that have been failed multiple times, and is a quirk of the scheduling algorithm. In ease hell, the algorithm schedules the card with too small of an interval, and the interval does not grow fast enough, so you see cards way more frequently than necessary, both boring you and wasting your precious time. Both ease hell and leaches require manual intervention to fix or reset the problem cards. (To the developers: please don’t over analyze the leach & ease hell problem and insist on an “automated only” solution for them. Let there also be a manual intervention option.)

However, remnote in its current state has no way of identifying these problem cards, and even if these problem cards are identified there are minimal options to deal with them. The solution, proposed very nicely above, is a card browser in addition to the ability to manually change the SRS meta data (let me change ease and interval).

Now, I understand that the ease hell problem would not be an issue if people would properly rate for difficulty when answering. However, I and many others, just give the same rating for every card because it takes too much mental effort to decide on a rating for every card.

6 Likes

Hello everyone,
first let me thank you for the development of this more than awesome piece of software :slight_smile:
Now let’s come to my feature requests:

I do think RemNote needs an overview-page for all flashcards!
If you start growing your knowledge base with flashcards in some (but not all) of your Documents, I find it easy to loose track of all your flashcard-sources.

Therefore I suggest

  • a page wich conveniently displays all documents which contain flashcards, together with the number of flashcards per document
  • an easy way to see if flashcards are enabled/disabled for a source-doc on this overview-page
  • an easy way to toogle flashcards on/off for a source
  • an easy way to study flashcards per page
  • an easy way to view “just” the flashcards of a page - so I can quickly make changes to all the flashcards of a page without touching my notes surrounding them on the page

Furthermore the dropdown “Flashcards for …” in the Queue should automatically filter for sources which include enabled flashcards and exclude all pages without flashcards or with disabled flashcards.
image


Last I would love the ability to disable the context-hierarchy for individual flashcards.
In general I love to see the context of the flashcard and this is indeed a standout feature of RemNote for me. But sometimes the hierarchy makes it impossible to create certain flashcards in your notes since the answer can be found in the hierarchy already ^^
For example:
I have a page on the tree oak. On this page I want to include picture-flashcards which ask me to identify the tree. This doesn`t make much sense, if I can see the answer in the hierarchy of the flashcard :slight_smile:


I hope my suggestions make sense to you! Maybe some of my requests already exist and I haven’t found them - feel free to correct me anytime.
If you have any question I’ll be glad to answer them.
Greetings Flummic

2 Likes

This is discussed here.

3 Likes

Thank you for linking me to this topic!!

2 Likes

Maybe we could add a “flashcards-tab” to the all-notes-section which shows all flashcards grouped by their parent documents as mentioned in my post above?

On top of that I would love to see a visual indicator in the “all-notes” section that shows me whether a doc contains flashcards or not.
Maybe this indicator could also visualize information like the number of flashcards and whether they are currently active/turned off :slight_smile:

Furthermore the option to filter “all-notes” by “does include flashcards” would be awesome! :smiley:

3 Likes