Any Use of Spaced Repetition/Incremental Reading?

Meta
#1

Hello everyone, first-time poster here who just discovered Org-Roam this week.

I was poking around for a way to cobble together a bunch of Learning/Knowledge Management ideas using Emacs, and I happened to stumble on Org-Roam, which seems like exactly what I didn’t even know I wanted. I’m still getting set up and comfortable with it, but I have a question about a possible extension:

Has anyone incorporated any kind of spaced repetition to their workflow with Org-Roam? I saw Org-FC mentioned in the appendix of the documentation, but I haven’t done anything with it yet.

I’m specifically interested in Incremental Reading, which I think the ecosystem ought to support with a little configuration.

Even if nobody else has given this a shot, I’ll share my efforts once I start working on getting it up and running, but I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel if anybody has more thoughts than you can find at the Emacs Wiki incremental reading page or the Org-Drill page.

1 Like
#2

I think some people have used Anki for spaced repetition, I would look at this thread …

2 Likes
#3

Thanks very much for the link, that package certainly looks great, and I plan to start using it with my basic flashcards. I’ve been hoping to find a way, though, to use an in-Emacs spaced repetition package, like org-drill (linked above) or org-fc in order to present information within emacs.

One example workflow might be to put my fleeting thoughts into spaced repetition in order to prompt me to refine them into permanent slips. If I wasn’t ready to work on it, I could “remember” it and have it pop up later.

Another might be to have a longer captured excerpt pop up based on the SRS algorithm and then I could capture some portion of it to create a new note with a backlink to the longer piece.

As I said in the OP, I’m still getting comfortable with the more basic functions of org-roam, but I look forward to trying to build out some workflows like the above.

#4

I’m very interested in this - I’ve been using Anki/AnkiEditor, but so far it’s more to remember facts than for incremental reading. I’d like to use it for that too and would be interested to hear in any solution you come up with.

This post on How to build a spaced repetition system in Roam Research might be an interesting approach for a way to leverage SRS in org-roam that doesn’t require any additional package at all.

Andy Matuschak has some good notes on spaced repetition for application, synthesis and creation.

2 Likes
#5

Thanks very much for those links! I wasn’t able to read the first without a membership, which was disappointing, but Andy Matuschak’s thoughts were really interesting and useful. I’ve vaguely tried some variations similar to what he talks about, like using some Anki cards to remind me to apply something, rather than just remember it, but his framework is much more complete. I could see that idea working nicely with org-roam by having a card that has links to others in an SRS set up, and the prompt is to read through the links or look for more connections and link them.

#6

Hi there,
Your question triggered me to share my basic way of doing spaced repetition in org mode. I recently integrated org-roam into it by using custom Elisp links in my agenda.
Give a look to https://ag91.github.io/blog/2020/09/04/the-poor-org-user-spaced-repetition/ if you are curious!

#7

I got wrong-number-of-arguments with both snippets, any update? I am using Emacs 27 /org-mode9.4 with Arch Linux.

#8

Hey mistan,

Very weird. I just tried with a clean installation of Emacs 27 with Org
9.4.4 and the code (at the bottom of the post) worked fine.

Any chance you can set (setq debug-on-error 't) and share the stack
trace?

#9

Hi Andrea,

Thanks for your effort and prompt response. The following is what I am getting.

funcall-interactively: Wrong number of arguments: (lambda (e) "Resets the header on the TODO states and increases the date
according to a suggested spaced repetition interval." (interactive) (edebug-enter 'my/space-repeat-if-tag-spaced (list e) #'(lambda nil (edebug-after (edebug-before 0) 73 (let* ((spaced-rep-map '(... ... ... ... ... ...)) (spaced-key "spaced") (tags (edebug-after (edebug-before 1) 2 (org-get-tags))) (spaced-todo-p (edebug-after (edebug-before 3) 6 (member ... ...))) (repetition-n (edebug-after (edebug-before 7) 11 (car ...))) (n+1 (edebug-after (edebug-before 12) 29 (if ... ... 0))) (spaced-repetition-p (edebug-after (edebug-before 30) 33 (alist-get ... ...))) (new-repetition-tag (edebug-after (edebug-before 34) 38 (concat "repetition" ...))) (new-tags (edebug-after (edebug-before 39) 49 (reverse ...)))) (edebug-after (edebug-before 50) 72 (if (edebug-after (edebug-before 51) 54 (and ... ...)) (edebug-after (edebug-before 55) 71 (progn ... ... ... ... ...))))))))), 0

UPDATE: After I restarted my system, it seems working now. This is really cool! Is there a way to skip adding DONE tag in headline?

#10

Hey mistan,

I guess you are using M-x my/space-repeat-if-tag-spaced, but I designed
the function to run automatically when you use M-x org-todo if you
have a tag :spaced: on the heading.

An example of heading:

  • TODO something I really want to learn :spaced:
    SCHEDULE:<2020-09-23>

If you call M-x org-todo on it, it will be rescheduled in a spaced
repetition fashion.

In Elisp you can call a function with M-x only if it starts like:

(defun fun () (interactive) …)

I prefer Emacs doing things for me when possible, so I hid the thing
behind a hook (which runs the function after another action I do):

(add-hook 'org-trigger-hook 'my/space-repeat-if-tag-spaced)

Hope it helps!

#11

Hi Andrew,

Thanks for your reply. You guessed right. I did try to call M-x my/space-repeat-if-tag-spaced after adding (interactive).

Just to clarify. It will insert DONE in the headline after clicking done in each repetition. Any way to prevent the headline from modified?

#12

sorry for the late reply. My function should just mark it done and then set it to todo again. Also it should not be used interactively, but it silently works when you mark a headline as done. Instead of setting it as DONE, it will increase the repetition counter tag.