Org-Drill on Android?

Along with my org-roam use, I started using org-drill. It is great for my learning workflow: I create org-roam subheader items per note (or “idea nugget”) on my org-roam-dailies, and turn that subheader into a org-drill flashcard for spaced repetition of the ideas I get from the books.

Now it works on my laptop very well. But I have been looking around for a way to carry on my org-drill flashcard reviews on my android as well. As far as I came across, I saw there is some way to do on the android with anki, anki web server, etc. However, I am not sure how that sync with the drill sessions between the android and laptop (would anki be able to modify the org-roam subheadings properly?).

Anyone have a someway of using the org-drill flashcards on their mobile (android)?

If you have a big keyboard - you can run emacs on anything? What’s the limitation of org-drill in android? I have never tried running Emacs on Android, but I think it should be indifferent to whether you are running it in android or any other OS.

What’s the problem?

Syncing your drills between anki and emacs would require a lot of work.

My suggestion: export your cards to anki, and use anki to sync between ankidroid and anki. It works well. Then use anki and/or anki-droid.

GitHub - louietan/anki-editor: Emacs minor mode for making Anki cards with Org is a good package. It needs anki running with anki-connect to send it the cards, but it is not hard to setup.

The version by louietan has been abandoned
so is org-drill (the algorithm is also wrongly implemented)

I set it up through

First install as an addon in anki

It’s best not to use any SRS in org directly - since all of them seems to be abandoned just as quickly.

yet still there are some still maintained such as

but still its best to just set it up directly in anki itself. Its easy to just send your org nodes to anki.

Any links to further discussion on this?

https://www.reddit.com/r/AnkiComputerScience/comments/y99lcu/comment/jrai2j3/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

That was interesting to read.

I can verify that org-drill-cram doesn’t work with emacs 29.3 (from debian stable), org mode 9.6.15 (from debian stable). The error message is org-parse-time-string: Not an Org time string: [Y-06-18 Tue 12:%], which seems to support the reddit poster’s case.

Apart from that, I cannot comment on the SM5 vs. SM2 algorithm differences, and the suggested deficiency of SM5. Although, I need to note that the link in the reddit post says SM5 is proprietary, BUT the anki faq mentions SM17 as proprietary. So, I think there is a confusion whether SM5 is proprietary and whether it is “wrongly implemented” in org-drill.

Overall, the first of the issues is annoying. I wish org-drill would get updated to use the newest org-mode time stamp formats. However, I think I can live with that. The org-drill command still works, and it still schedules the cards for future reviewing. I will continue using that in desktop emacs.


Bringing this forum thread back on its topic: I asked if there was an orgzly-like app for android that would allow me to review my org-drill flashcards. I specifically asked for an APP because emacs on mobile (whether installed from the f-droid org run inside termux) is not pleasant to use. Emacs simply relies heavily on physical keyboard presses, and emulating that on a touchscreen is not successful on android.

Now, after searching the web myself, I conclude that there is no such app available. The closes that comes to it, may be, Logseq itself, which has an android app, BUT it is its own note-taking app, outside of the emacs+org+roam+drill ecosystem. Conclusion: not satisfactory.

I want to ask – why org-drill specifically? Do you have too many drill notes - and now you don’t want to switch to anything else? refactoring all these nodes would be difficult and so on?

I personally don’t like something that asks for my subjective opinion in how I am able to remember it, easy, semi-medium, semi-hard, hard, nepenthe, and so on – all these SRS systems ask too many questionsl- idk.

You need a way to access these notes outside the desktop while traveling and so on. With something like Gnosis I can easily export them to org then to pdf then to paper, it implements an sqlite database for these notes - and doesn’t rely on org in any way. So no bothering about ever refactoring them for something else. Also what I like is the ability to make MCQs apart from all types of other flash cards - it is also has a very small code base to understanding it and bending it to requirement is also easy.

With all these factors, I think one must make preparations to move away from org-drill in the end, its complication means that you are essentially reliant on somebody else to fix if something goes wrong - and that somebody is not guaranteed to be there for xyz reasons, so simple code bases can trivially be abandoned, but complex code bases not so much without stranding the user.

You can have a small subset of your org-roam files under logseq. Make the logseq subdirectory a subdirectory of your org-roam, and configure logseq to use org files.

the problem is that logseq has very opinionated ways to name files.

I suspect fixing anki connect would be trivial. I use anki everyday, but I never thought of editing my notes in emacs.

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I played to with org-anki. It seems to work. But it has some disadvantages:

  • it can download a deck into org, but after that, synchronization is only org to anki
  • it can only deal with 2 fields: one in the front and one in the back
  • below is how the card is represented in org
     * content in the first field
     :PROPERTIES:
     :ANKI_NOTE_TYPE: dmgJP
     :ANKI_NOTE_ID: 1718924120841
     :END:
     
     content in the second field