Working with Flashcards in Obsidian
Flashcards are an important part of knowledge work, as a tool to transfer information to your brain. I’ve been using Obsidian as my primary tool for knowledge work for a long time, and after trying a lot of different approaches, I've settled on a workflow that I think is worth sharing.
I hope someone may find some value in it!
The Workflow
You just worked long hours to study human anatomy and created some great notes about it in your Obsidian vault. In order to remember all this new information, you need some flashcards.
You open up Obsidian and your flashcard app side by side and write down the first question, "How many limbs does a human have?". Over in Obsidian, you see a heading where underneath is all the relevant information.
Your actions:
Place your cursor at the heading in Obsidian.
Hit shortcut A
Go over to the flashcard app and place your cursor on the backside of the flashcard
Enter textexpander keyword.
A link will appear that will take you to the relevant location in your vault. Done!
When linking to a text-block inside Obsidian, you have to create an inline-link first. So after selecting the block, hit shortcut B before going through the other steps.
Repeat for all flashcards you want to create.
This takes you 6s for a flashcard.
I just timed it.
Reviewing your cards, the clickable link will take you to your desired location, where you can check if you remembered your knowledge correctly.
This will work on desktop as well as on mobile.
(Make sure your mobile Obsidian is synced and the relevant plug-ins are enabled )
Hopefully, the valuable part of coming up with good questions and checking your answers in your vault will be front and center, and the repetitive task of creating flashcards will be automatic.
Setting things up
I use this workflow with Remnote. You can see why at the "Thoughts behind this Workflow" section. With some small alterations, it should work for most other flashcard apps as well.
I assume that you have a basic understanding of the Obsidian interface and settings.
Shortcut A: Copy an Obsidian URI to your headings and blocks locations.
In order to open Obsidian at our desired location, we can use an URI that specifies where our target is located. So just like an URL in the WWW takes you to your desired website, this will take you to your block or heading.
Install the „Advanced URI“ plug-in from the community plugins.
In the hotkeys setting, search hotkeys for: „Advanced URI: Copy URI for current file“ and assign the hotkey of your preference.
Give it a try. The plug-in will create the URI and save it to your clipboard. The URI will depend on where your cursor is located.
Cursor on an empty line: Creates an URI that will link to the whole .md note.
Cursor on a heading: Creates an URI that will link to this heading (Note that when changing the heading's name, the link can’t find it anymore and it will just open the note)
Cursor on a text block: Creates an URI that links to this exact text block, but only if there is an internal link present. (That is why we set up the other shortcut beforehand.)
! Make sure to enable the „Advanced URI“ plug-in on mobile !
Shortcut B: copy an (inline)link to your markdown blocks and headings.
Install the "Copy Block Link" Plug-In from the community plugins.
In the hotkeys setting, search hotkeys for: „Copy Block Link: Copy link to current block or heading“ and assign the hotkey of your preference.
Give it a try to see what it is doing. You will notice that when selecting a text block, there will be an inline link created at the end of the line. I don’t like them cluttering up my interface, so I have a CSS snippet that will hide them from view.
BTW: I use this shortcut all the time to quickly create links inside of Obsidian.
Formatted link with a textexpander
When you created your URI, you could simply paste it into Remnote. But since long links look confusing, we can make things prettier and create a nicely formated link with this syntax: (name)[link]
For this, we can use a text expander that will take our URI from the clipboard and create the link for us.
I use Raycast for this, which has a textexpander built in, but any other should work as well, as long as it can insert your clipboard dynamically.
Using Raycast, open the „create snippet“ command. Give it a name, use 'link-name', and define a keyword to call it up. (I start all my keywords with a semicolon, since I rarely use it. So for me it is: ";obs")
You can write whatever you want in „link-name“. This is what will be displayed as text for your link. I use "obsmd".
That's all, you should be able to follow the workflow above.
Thoughts behind this Workflow
Since knowledge is in our heads, not in an Obsidian vault, flashcards are an important tool to transfer knowledge from digital bits to neuronal connections.
I always liked the idea of having flashcards that will lead me directly into Obsidian.
A great benefit is that your flashcards will grow with your vault. So when updating pieces of information, you don't have to worry about updating your flashcards.
I prefer to organize flashcards in an external application.
Obsidian is a great tool to organize and structure information, but it isn’t designed for flashcards. Should they invest time and effort in creating the Obsidian flashcard core plug-in? I don’t think so. Why not let another team build a great flashcard application and make them work together.
An external application gives you reliability.
The last time I used an Obsidian plug-in, the flashcard data was stored inside the markdown file, where it could get corrupted, and I was always concerned about messing things up. External applications have their long-tested approach of storing and updating the metadata of the flashcards, with you never have to think of breaking it.
Another point is that the way you structure your flashcards doesn’t have to be aligned with the way you structure your knowledge, so it doesn't interfere with your notes. So having flashcards in a different application helps to declutter both worlds, having a workspace for each usecase.
Why Remnote as the flashcard application?
This comes down to personal preference. As far as I’m aware, Anki and Remnote are the most widely used and therefore reliable applications, and my approach should work for both (but I haven’t tried it with Anki yet).
I find Remnote a great application!
Highlights are: ease and speed of use, good mobile integration, outliner structure of the flashcards, easy image occlusion and clozures.
I haven’t regretted my choice yet, and I’m happily paying my monthly fee for a good and useful application.
Miscellaneous
In Remnote, you have to insert a line break, before adding the link. Otherwise the link sometimes doesn’t work
URIs that link to headings don’t use a unique identifier.
Changing a heading will only bring you to the note and not the heading anymore. To prevent this, you can use an inline link there as well and it will work even if you change the name.
I haven’t needed it yet, but I think it should be possible to extend this workflow to link to PDF sections in Obsidian as well.
If you want to get fancy, you can create custom inline links for flashcards and create a css snippet that will display them with a symbol of your choice. For a time, I had a small ⚓ symbol, so I could see which blocks had flashcards. But I got rid of it eventually.
If you want to find the flashcard based on the internal link from Obsidian, just search for it in your flashcards application and it will show you the corresponding cards.
The End
I hope after reading this, you have learned something new.
If there are any questions, I’m happy to answer.
I’ve been using Obsidian pretty much since they started the project and benefited a lot from other people sharing their work. I hope I can do this here as well and bring in some inspiration.
If you have feedback, writing advice, and tips for proper use of English, please send it to me! ☺️
Best Regards
Friedolito