AnkiTools VS anki-connect

Not needing Anki itself is pretty much a requirement for me, because that's the way which makes sense in my worldview. Tools work independently and feed into each other—not get slapped onto each other, which kinda smells like a whiff of bad OOP.

I began a feeble attempt at a lib for my own purposes, but I had to take Anki db structs a little at a time just to keep my frustration in check.

There are in fact some libs for writing Anki data: https://github.com/kerrickstaley/genanki and maybe https://github.com/patarapolw/AnkiTools — but genanki, while looking quite good for one-time generation, doesn't seem to be able to update cards.

Afaik Anki itself does include Python libs for creating and manipulating db records—however dunno if they work without the full app running, and on top of that I personally keep trying to use Lua, since it runs circles around Python in terms of speed.

Creating a Node.js Scraper: Initially, I created a web scraper for my Anki collection using Anki Connect and Node.js. I chose Node.js because I believed that using Rust would require defining every field for the response object(later found out I was wrong). Encountered issues: My program kept crashing due to not specifying the query to be of the same type(as I am writing this I realize I could have just did if(note.field == undefined) continue;) or the TypeScript ?. Resorting to single requests: To resolve the issue, I decided to send one request per card, resulting in processing 50,000 cards, which took 15-30 minutes.

Has anyone used the insertReviews() function before to simulate answering cards programmatically? I’m not able to find much information online regarding it (perhaps because it is relatively new). I am not confident enough in my knowledge of Anki’s review algorithm to attempt replicating its behavior on all 9 of the required inputs for each review (see the 'Manual Analysis' subsection here); wanted to reach out here to see if anyone had experience with the function they would like to share.

I do however create all my decks in Emacs' Org mode using louietan/anki-editor and export to Anki via the plugin FooSoft/anki-connect. This way I never worry about my decks getting corrupted. I actually just have one large deck but anki-editor allows me to separate my deck into separate org files which is convenient.

Another tool I've used if you have the Anki app is the Anki-Connect plugin https://github.com/FooSoft/anki-connect

It supports curl, python, javascript, etc to add cards and supports an incredible amount of actions to interact with Anki.

Example:

Just to add a footnote to the above: I wasn't aware of https://foosoft.net/projects/anki-connect/ so what I'm thinking about is very doable right now, and probably being done.

I've made a small script to make cards with audio. Following the manual at https://foosoft.net/projects/anki-connect/, I have an audio field of:

I dont think there's a public/documented Ankiweb api. You could use AnkiConnect to interface with your locally running instance of Anki: https://foosoft.net/projects/anki-connect/

Read the AnkiConnect documentation. You can interact with AnkiConnect in any language environment you wish. I've mostly - but not exclusively - used Python. It would probably be a very forgiving way to begin.

I write my cards in plaintext (Emacs Org mode via anki-editor) and push them to Anki via anki-connect. The advantages for me are:

create Anki cards with Emac's anki-editor and push them to Anki with anki-connect. There is also a markdown equivalent of anki-editor if you prefer that format plus packages to perform your SRS within Emacs itself such as org-drill, org-fc and pamparam.