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taylormitchell / ankify_roam

A command-line tool which brings flashcards created in Roam to Anki.
MIT License
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Ankify Roam

A command-line tool which brings flashcards created in Roam Research to Anki.

Main Features

Contents

  1. Main Features
  2. Installation
  3. Requirements
  4. Basic Usage
  5. Options
  6. Customize Anki and Roam
  7. Sync Automatically
  8. Problems

Installation

pip install ankify_roam

Requirements

Basic Usage

1. Ankify Roam

Ankify a block (ie. flag it to go to Anki) by adding the #ankify tag to it. The tag must be included in the block itself, it cannot be inherited from it's parents.

By default, the block will be converted into a front/back style Anki note with the block content on the front and it's children on the back:

  • What is the capital of France? #ankify
    • Paris

If the block includes any cloze deletions, ankify_roam converts it to a cloze style Anki note. Add a cloze deletion by surrounding text in curly brackets:

{Paris} is the capital and most populous city of {France}, with a estimated population of {2,148,271} residents #ankify

In the example above, ankify_roam will add incremental cloze ids for each cloze deletion. But you can also explicitly define them (or a mixture of both). Here's an example showing what cloze markup in Roam becomes in Anki:

{Paris} is the capital and most populous city of {2:France}, with a estimated population of {2,148,271} residents #ankify
→
{{c1::Paris}} is the capital and most populous city of {{c2::France}}, with a estimated population of {{c3::2,148,271}} residents #ankify

Cloze ids matching the following patterns are all supported by ankify_roam: "c1:", "c1|", "1:"

2. Export Roam

Once you've tagged all the blocks to ankify, export your Roam:

  1. Click on the "more options" button in the top right corner of Roam.
  2. Select Export All > JSON > Export All to export your Roam graph.
  3. Unzip the downloaded file.

3. Open Anki

Open Anki. Make sure you're on the profile you'd like to add the cards to and that you've installed the AnkiConnect add-on.

4. Create Roam note types (first time only)

Create 2 new note types in Anki: 'Roam Basic' and 'Roam Cloze'. These are the note types which your flashcards in Roam will be added as.

Steps to create a 'Roam Basic' note type:

Steps to create a 'Roam Cloze' note type:

(You can also create your own note types, and have ankify_roam populate those. For details, see Create custom note types.)

5. Add the Roam export to Anki

ankify_roam add my_roam.json

(Replace "my_roam.json" with the filename of the json within the zip you downloaded in step 2)

Your flashcards should now be in Anki!

6. Repeat

Whenever you create new flashcards in Roam or edit the existing ones, repeat these same steps to update Anki with the changes.

Options

Roam Export Path

The path to your exported Roam graph can refer to the json, the zip containing the json, or the directory which the zip is in. When a directory is given, ankify_roam will find and add the latest export in it. In my case, all 3 of these commands do the same thing:

ankify_roam add my_roam.json
ankify_roam add Roam-Export-1592525007321.zip
ankify_roam add ~/Downloads

Choose a different ankify tag

To use a tag other than #ankify to flag flashcards, pass the tag name to --tag-ankify: 

ankify_roam add --tag-ankify=flashcard my_roam.json

... and if there are some blocks which include the #flashcard tag but you actually don't want ankify_roam to ankify it, add another tag (eg. #not-a-flashcard) and then tell ankify_roam by passing it to --tag-dont-ankify: 

ankify_roam add --tag-ankify=flashcard --tag-dont-ankify=not-a-flashcard my_roam.json

Change the default deck and note types

To import your flashcards to different note types than the default 'Roam Basic' and 'Roam Cloze', pass the note type names to --note-basic and --note-cloze (see Create custom note types for details):

ankify_roam add --note-basic="My Basic" --note-cloze="My Cloze" my_roam.json

To import your flashards to a different deck than "Default", pass the deck name to --deck:

ankify_roam add --deck="Biology" my_roam.json

You can also specify the deck and note type on a per-note basis using tags in Roam:

  • 2+2={4} #[[ankify_roam: deck="Math"]] #[[ankify_roam: note="Cloze for math"]]

(When a deck or note type is specified using a tag on the block, those will take precedence over the deck and note type specified at the command line.)

Show parent blocks

To show the parents of your ankified block, pass a number of parents (or "all") to --num-parents.

Here's an example where we specified that all parents should be included:

ankify_roam add --num-parents=all Geography.json

Notice that "Geography" is shown differently from the rest of the parents. By default, the top level parent is shown as a title and all other parents are shown as breadcrumbs underneath. Because we included all parents, the top level parent for both blocks was the page name. But that's not always the case, as I'll show in the next example.

You can also use a tag to specify the num-parents on a single block. In this example, the num-parents was set to 2 using an inline tag:

This ankified block has 3 parents: first parent is "[[Frace]]", the second is "Capitals", and the third is "Geography". Since num-parents was set to 2, only "[[Frace]]" and "Capitals" was included. In this case, "Capitals" was the top most parent included, so it's now the one displayed as a title.

Cloze delete the base name only

When you add a cloze deletion around a namespaced page reference, eg.

... you can tell ankify_roam to only cloze delete the base name part of the page reference, leaving out the namespace, eg.

... by setting the --pageref-cloze option to "base_only":

ankify_roam add --pageref-cloze=base_only my_roam.json

You can also set this on an individual note:

  • The {[[Design Pattern/Adaptor Pattern]]} specifies... #[[ankify_roam: pageref-cloze="base_only"]]

Customize Anki and Roam

Create custom note types

As mentioned in the options section, you can import to different note types than the default 'Roam Basic' and 'Roam Cloze' types provided. Those note types will need to satisfy 2 requirements to be compatible with ankify_roam:

  1. The first field(s) is for content from Roam (first 2 for Basic and 1 for Cloze). When ankify_roam converts a Roam block into an Anki note, it takes the content of the block and places it into the first field of the Anki note. For basic notes, it also takes the content of the block's children and adds them to the second field. The names of these fields doesn't matter, it just matters that they come first in the field order.

  2. Include an additional field called "uid". In addition to those fields, a "uid" field is required. This field is used by ankify_roam to remember which block in Roam corresponds with which note in Anki. Without this field, when you make a change to a block in Roam, ankify_roam will add that block as a new note in Anki rather than updating the existing one.

If you are going to make your own note types, I'd suggest you create clones of the 'Roam Basic' and 'Roam Cloze' note types and then just edit the style of those clones (see here for a tutorial).

CSS ideas for your Anki cards

Hide all Roam tags (eg. the #ankify tag)

.rm-page-ref-tag {
    display: none;
}

Hide page reference brackets.

.rm-page-ref-brackets {
    display: none;
}

When a block has multiple children, they're added as bullet points on the backside of a card. If you'd prefer not to show the bullets, similar to the "View as Document" option in Roam, use the following CSS:

.back-side ul {
    list-style-type: none;
    text-align: left;
    margin-left: 0;
    padding-left: 0;
}

Add color or hide cloze deletions in Roam

You can also define cloze deletions using curly bracket inside square brackets:

The nice thing about doing it this way is that you can now style the cloze markup.

For example, you can make the cloze brackets only faintly visible by:

  1. Pressing Ctrl-C Ctrl-B in Roam to hide the square brackets surrounding page links.
  2. Adding this css to your [[roam/css]] page (how to video here) to change the color of the curly brackets: 
    span[data-link-title="{"] > span,
span[data-link-title="}"] > span
{
color: #DDDCDC !important;
}

Now the block shown above will look like this:

Note: Just like the regular cloze markup, the page links can also include cloze ids eg. [[{c1:]]Paris[[}]]

Sync Automatically

It is possible to set up automatic updates of Anki using Roam To Git.

Follow the instructions on the Roam to Git page for setting up an automatically updating repository on GitHub. Clone that repository to your local machine: git clone https://github.com/YOURNAME/notes

Now you can run

ankify_roam add /PATH_TO_YOUR_REPO/notes/json/YOURDBNAME.json

And further, you can add the git update to crontab:
echo "15 * * * * 'cd PATH_TO_YOUR_REPO;git pull;PATH_TO_ANKIFY/ankify_roam add PATH_TO_YOUR_REPO/json/YOURDBNAME.json '" | crontab

Now you'll have git Roam to Git cloning your notes from Roam on the hour, and fifteen minutes later any updates/new items will be pulled in Anki, as long as it is running.

Problems

Missing Features

Non-Intuitive Behaviour