Comment by amluto

> Is that not what anki does? You have a collection of cards, each card can be in one or more decks derived from the cards.

Kind of? As far as I can tell (and I haven't spent enormous amounts of time digging in), there are decks, and a deck contains the notes, the templates (and the cards, which may or may not have any sort of independent existence outside the notes and templates that generate them?), and a deck also contains the scheduling information.

One can export the textual and markup contents of decks, but not the media, into a text file, and one can re-import it, supposedly losslessly. One can also export a deck minus scheduling information for sharing purposes. I'm not sure that one can re-import it.

Then there is a collection, which is the whole world: decks along with their scheduling info.

> That's also decks. You can have your 'Japanese' deck, and then the 'Japanese::writing' subdeck for the subset which require you to have your writing materials handy.

I'm guessing that, if I start by importing a Japanese deck from some other source (because, for example, there's a source with high-quality notes), and then I split it into a writing subdeck, and then the original source adds new notes for new words or makes changes or whatever, that merging the results is basically unsupported.

> > Anki doesn’t seem to separate these layers at all. Everything is a monolithic database.

> Decks are separate files which can be shared, edited, created, studied, and reasoned about independently.

Yes, but only as monoliths (again, as far as I can tell). I can export an "Anki Deck Package (.apkg)", but checking that into git would result in a bit of nonsense. I can't export my scheduling information and templates separately from the underlying notes (or, if I can, I failed to find this option).

>> Export is unpleasant. Sharing is unpleasant

> It's just files (zip files really). What's unpleasant about it?

Excel and OpenDocument sheet files are also zip files. But the respective tools are less limiting and don't expect the users to unzip those zip files. (And their merging and text import/export facilities are also weak, and that's unfortunate.)

I could be wrong about most of this. But Anki doesn't seem friendly to a decomposed workflow in the way that modern programming lanuages are.