Virtual flashcards with Anki
Learn It!
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.
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