Ankify Roam

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

Main Features

• Create front/back and cloze deletion flashcards in Roam and import to Anki.
• Supports block references, images, and aliases.
• Include parent blocks as breadcrumbs on your Anki cards
• Make edits in Roam to flashcards you've already imported and sync the changes to Anki.
• Uses similar HTML syntax to Roam so you can style your Anki cards just like you do Roam.
• Add color to or hide cloze deletion markup in Roam.

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 git+https://github.com/taylormitchell/ankify_roam.git

or the following to install the development branch

pip install git+https://github.com/taylormitchell/ankify_roam.git@dev

Requirements

• Python >=3.6
• Anki
• AnkiConnect (add-on for Anki)

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)

Run the following to 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.

ankify_roam init

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]]:deck="Math"]] #[[[[ankify]]: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.)

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]]: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).

Show parent blocks as breadcrumbs

When your Roam blocks are imported to roam, their parent blocks are included with the block. By default, these blocks are hidden, but you can display them with some changes to the css. Follow the steps below to show the parent blocks as breadcrumbs above your flashcard:

If you have Anki notes added using ankify_roam <=0.0.5, you'll need to update the css on your 'Roam Basic' and 'Roam Cloze' note types and re-add your blocks from Roam first. You can do that by installing the latest version of ankify_roam and then running the following commands:

ankify_roam init --overwrite # update note type css
ankify_roam add my_roam.json # update flashcards to include parent blocks

Now remove the default css which hides the parent blocks from your 'Roam Basic' and 'Roam Cloze' note types:

.parent {
    display: none;
}

Then add this css to display the parent blocks as breadcrumbs:

.parent {
    display: inline-block;
    font-size: 10px;
}
.parent::after {
    content: "›";
    padding-left: 5px;
    padding-right: 5px;
}
.front-side>:not(.parent).block {
    padding-top: 10px;
}

Create links back to original Roam blocks

If you edit the card types in Anki, you can add hyperlinks that allow you to click through to the original roam source. Eg if you add

<p>
<a href="https://roamresearch.com/#/app/YOURDATABASENAME/page/{{uid}}">*</a>

To both card types, you will get a small "*" which when clicked links back to Roam. Note however that this is a little slow as Roam will reload in a new tab- you need a local scripting tool such as Keyboard Maestro to work around this.

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:

li {
    list-style-type: none;
}

Add color or hide cloze deletions in Roam

You also define cloze deletions using curly bracket in page links:

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

• No LaTeX support
• No syntax highlighting for code blocks

Non-Intuitive Behaviour

• If you change a flashcard's field content in Anki, that change will be overwritten with whatever is in Roam the next time you run ankify_roam. So make those changes in Roam, not Anki.
• When a flashcard in Roam has already been imported to Anki, the only changes made in Roam which will be reflected in Anki are changes to the fields. Changes to it's tags, deck, and note type need to be done manually in Anki.
• If you move the content of a block into a new block in Roam, ankify_roam will treat that as a new flashcard. This is because ankify_roam uses the block uid and the Anki uid field to know which block corresponds with which Anki note.
• Deleting a flashcard in Roam doesn't delete it in Anki. You'll need to delete it in Anki manually.
• A flashcard deleted in Anki will be re-imported to Anki next time you run ankify_roam if you don't also delete it or remove the #ankify tag in Roam.
• When you let ankify_roam infer the cloze ids, you can get some weird behaviour when you add a new cloze deletion to a note in Roam which was already imported to Anki. For example, if you have "Paris is the capital of {France}" in Roam, that'll become "Paris is the capital of {{c1::France}}" in Anki. Later, if you add a cloze deletion around Paris ie. "{Paris} is the capital of {France}", ankify_roam will convert that into "{{c1::Paris}} is the capital of {{c2::France}}". Notice that the "France" cloze id is now "c2" instead of "c1". This is because ankify_roam assigns cloze ids in the order that the cloze deletions appear. The result is that in Anki the original flashcard will now cloze delete "Paris" instead of "France" and a new flashcard will be added which cloze deletes "France". To avoid this, explicitely add cloze ids in Roam which match the existing note in Anki eg. "{2:Paris} is the capital of {1:France}"