AnkiTools VS anki-rb

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.

A few years ago I wrote a ruby gem to generate anki decks and spent some time reversing the schema from the android app and open source code. There were some very weird decisions iirc, something around pipe characters to mark individual card fields.

https://github.com/rkachowski/anki-rb