hascard

A minimal commandline utility for reviewing notes. 'Flashcards' can be written in markdown-like syntax.

Contents

• Installation
• Usage

• Cards

  • Card Types
  • Definition
  • Multiple choice
  • Multiple answer
  • Open question
  • Reorder question
  • Including files
  • LaTeX

• Miscellaneous info

Installation

Installation on Windows is not possible sadly, aside from WSL. This is because hascard depends on vty which only supports UNIX-like operating systems (this includes macOS).

Homebrew (for macOS)

For macOS users an installation using homebrew is provided via a custom tap. You can run

brew update
brew install Yvee1/tools/hascard

Binary

Ubuntu and macOS binaries are available under releases. To be able to run it from any directory, it has to be added to the PATH. This can be done by copying it to e.g. the

/usr/local/bin

Arch Linux

Thanks to loki7990, hascard is also on the AUR: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/hascard/.

Snapcraft

Hascard is also on snapcraft. Installation instructions are on that site. If you already have snap installed you can just install hascard via

sudo snap install hascard

%HOME/snap/hascard

home

sudo snap connect hascard:home :home

Note: Because of problems with snap and terminfo, the snap installation does not work directly with somewhat non-standard terminals like st-256 and alacritty. This is because the snap environment does not have the necessary terminfo files for these terminals, but copying the terminfo file from the system is a workaround (see this comment).

Install from source

Another option is to build hascard and install it from source. For this you can use the Haskell build tool called stack, or nix. Then for example clone this repository somewhere:

git clone https://github.com/Yvee1/hascard.git
cd hascard

stack install hascard

nix-build

Usage

Simply run

hascard

After finishing a deck, there is an option to create new decks from the correctly answered or incorrectly answered cards, or both. The correct cards of a file named

deck.txt

deck+.txt

deck-.txt

CLI

The CLI provides two commands,

run

import

hascard run

hascard

run

As an example, say you have a file

deck.txt

hascard run deck -s -a 5

-s

-a 5

Importing decks

If you have decks in a different format, you might want to convert them into files compatible with hascard. Currently tab-seperated files can be converted to definition or open question cards. For example Quizlet decks can be exported to this format. As an example, the following file

aussi   ook
en outre, de plus   bovendien
de même    evenals

ook

aussi

bovendien

en outre|de plus

evenals

de même ``

with the command

. More info can be found in the help text at

Cards

Decks of cards are written in

.txt

.md

---

/cards

Card Types

In this section the 5 different types of cards are listed, first the text representation is given and after a gif of it is represented in the application.

Definition

This is the simplest card, it simply has a title and can be flipped to show the contents. For example the following card ```

Word or question

Explanation or definition of this word, or the answer to the question. ``` will result in

Multiple choice

This is a typical multiple choice question. The question starts with a

#

*

-

# Multiple choice question, (only one answer is right)
- Choice 1
* Choice 2 (this is the correct answer)
- Choice 3
- Choice 4

gets rendered as

Multiple answer

Multiple choice questions with multiple possible answers is also possible. Here again the question starts with

#

[ ]

*

x

# Multiple answer question
[*] Option 1 (this is a correct answer)
[ ] Option 2
[*] Option 3 (this is a correct answer)
[ ] Option 4

results in

Open question

Open questions are also supported. The words that have to be filled in should be surrounded by underscores

_

\_

cards/analysis3.txt

|

# Fill in the gaps
The symbol € is for the currency named _Euro_, and is used in the _EU|European Union_.

behaves like this

Reorder question

This is a question where you have to put the elements in the correct order. Each element is preceded by a number indicating their correct place. The elements are rendered in the same order as they are written. For example the card

# Order the letters in alphabetical order
4. u
1. l
2. p
3. s

will look like

Including files

You might want to include an image with a question. Rendering images in the terminal itself is not well supported, so instead an option is made available to let a file be opened automatically when a question is encountered. This can for example be used to include an image or pdf, which is then opened in the default application for that file type (internally the

xdg-open

open

What type of fruit is this?

- Apple * Pear - Orange - Banana ``

references the image

LaTeX

For reviewing content with mathematical symbols, functionality is included such that LaTeX can be used. Because LaTeX cannot be rendered in the terminal directly, it is first converted to a pdf file with the

pdflatex

The l^p metric space

The space $(\ell^p, d)$ is a metric space, when $d:\ell^p \times \ell^p \rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ is defined as
$$d(x, y) = \left(\sum_{n=1}^\infty |x_n-y_n|^p\right)^{1/p}$$

is an empty definition card and just opens a pdf file containing the mathematical statement in another window.

Note that no \begin{document}, \end{document} or \documentclass[]{} should be specified; this is already done automatically. The LaTeX packages "amsfonts", and "mathtools" are currently the only ones that are loaded.
Miscellaneous info
Written in Haskell, UI built with brick and parsing of cards done with megaparsec. Recordings of the terminal were made using terminalizer. The filebrowser widget was mostly copied from the brick filebrowser demo program. Homebrew and Travis configurations were made much easier by the tutorial from Chris Penner.