Virtual flashcards with Anki

Learn It!

Article from Issue 289/2024
Author(s):

Flashcards are a fast and effective way to memorize pertinent facts for your next exam. Anki takes this time-honored trick in a direction you never could have imagined in the days of those classic 3x5 cards.

Anki is a multiplatform, open source digital version of paper flashcards that "makes remembering things easy" [1] and "makes memory a choice" [2]. You can run Anki on Linux, macOS, and Windows systems, as well as on mobile devices [3].

Flashcards are a quick and easy way to memorize facts for academic tests and other training scenarios. The two main reasons to try Anki are the sheer number of cards it can handle (more than 100,000, according to its developers), and how easy it is to embed all kinds of content in each card, from audio and video to scientific formulas and musical scores. Anki also has many add-ons and a web interface [4] that you can use to study your cards online or keep them synchronized across multiple devices. Personally, I also really like that Anki saves and exports data in well-supported formats that make it easy to automatically create or analyze as many flashcards as I want in many different ways.

Installation and Upgrades

At the time of writing, there are two branches of Anki for Linux, one built with version 5 and one with version 6 of the same Qt graphic libraries that are the foundation of the KDE Desktop Environment. Both branches also depend on three external libraries – called libxcb-xinerama0, libxcb-cursor0, and libnss3 – that you should be able to install from the standard repositories of most Linux distributions.

[...]

Use Express-Checkout link below to read the full article (PDF).

Buy this article as PDF

Express-Checkout as PDF
Price $2.95
(incl. VAT)

Buy Linux Magazine

SINGLE ISSUES
 
SUBSCRIPTIONS
 
TABLET & SMARTPHONE APPS
Get it on Google Play

US / Canada

Get it on Google Play

UK / Australia

Related content

  • Anki

    Anki brings a virtual flash card box to the desktop. Thanks to a useful collection of add-ons, you can adapt Anki to suit your needs, making it one of the most efficient learning tools.

  • FOSSPicks

    This month Graham looks at SonoBus, NewsFlash, Kinto.sh, RetroShare, Emilia Pinball, and much more!

comments powered by Disqus
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters

Support Our Work

Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

Learn More

News