Migrating

Coming from Anki

nodes is built by someone who used Anki for years and got tired of specific things about it. So most of what you know transfers directly, a few words changed, and a handful of things genuinely work differently. This page is the honest version — including what Anki still does that this doesn't.

Moving a deck across

  1. Export from Anki

    File → Export, pick the deck, choose Anki Deck Package (.apkg), and — this is the part that matters — tick Include scheduling information. Without it you keep your cards but throw away every review you have ever done, and the scheduler starts from scratch on cards you have known for two years.

  2. Drop it on nodes

    Drag the .apkg onto the nodes window, or use Import. Big decks take a minute; it shows you what stage it's on.

  3. Check one card

    Open the deck, look at a card you know is due soon, and confirm the interval looks like it did in Anki. If it does, the history came across and you can carry on where you left off.

Import into a new deck, not an existing one. A deck you import into keeps its own settings, and importing the same file twice gives you two copies of every card rather than merging them.

What comes with it

From your .apkgNotes
Cards and notesYesIncluding the deck hierarchy, nested exactly as it was
Review historyYesThe whole revlog, so intervals and difficulty survive
Scheduling stateYesSM-2 and FSRS state are both mapped onto FSRS-6
MediaYesImages and audio, extracted alongside the cards
TagsYesSearchable in Browse, and used by exam practice
Cloze deletionsYesThey import and display correctly
Suspended cardsYesStay suspended
Note types & stylingYesKept, so cards render with their own CSS
Deck options presetMostlyRetention, learning and relearning steps, reviews/day, maximum interval and FSRS weights — but only onto newly created decks
Per-card FSRS decayNoRead from the file and then dropped; the scheduler uses one decay for everything
Add-on dataNoNothing add-on-specific survives an export anyway

One caveat on the weights. A modern FSRS-5 parameter set (19 weights) is upgraded to FSRS-6 exactly. An old FSRS-4.5 set (17 weights) is refused rather than guessed at — the deck still imports, it just starts on the app's defaults and re-optimises itself from your history.

The same thing, a different word

In AnkiIn nodes
Options group / presetDeck options — per-deck, and any field you leave alone inherits the global default instead of being copied
AnkiWeb syncSync — same idea, your own account, still manual
BrowseBrowse — same thing
LeechCards that keep failing are flagged as high lapse risk, and the ✨ button offers to rewrite or split them
Custom study / filtered decksSplit in two: Exam practice for cramming a topic, and spread the backlog for digging out of a pile
The FSRS add-onBuilt in. FSRS-6 is the only scheduler here; there is no SM-2 to switch back to
FSRS optimizerIn Deck options. Needs 512 reviews on the deck before it will run
Next day starts atSame setting, in Settings. Defaults to 4 a.m.

What actually works differently

The backlog is the app's problem, not yours

This is the thing the app was built for. Anki hands you 800 due cards after a bad fortnight and leaves the arithmetic to you. Here, Deck options has an action that takes that pile and deals it forward over the coming days at your own reviews/day pace — and Easy days moves reviews off days you have already said you're busy, before they land rather than after.

A session has a shape

Before you start you pick how the session runs: straight through, on a Pomodoro timer, or in chunks of N cards with a checkpoint between them. None of it touches scheduling — it exists because "study the deck" is often too big a thing to start, and "do twenty cards" isn't.

Your cards know about each other

Switch on the semantic features and the app embeds your collection with a model that runs on your own machine. After that it can show you the other cards about the same thing, draw them as a graph, and tell you while you're typing that you already wrote this card two years ago. Anki has no equivalent.

Card generation that argues with itself

Paste text or a PDF and it proposes cards — but it checks its own output first, by re-asking each question with the answer hidden and measuring whether it can get there. Cards that only look right get withheld, and you still approve everything by hand, twice. It is not a "generate 200 cards" button and deliberately so.

What Anki still does better

Anki is twenty years old and this is a beta by one person. These are real, and they are the reasons you might want to keep Anki installed for now.

  • A new-cards-per-day limit. nodes caps reviews per day but not new cards yet, so a freshly imported deck can hand you a lot of new material at once. Study it in chunks until this lands.
  • Writing cloze cards. Cloze deletions you import from Anki work fine. You can't author a new one here yet — new cards are front and back.
  • Note types that make several cards from one note. Yours are preserved on import and render correctly, but a card you write in nodes is one card, not a template.
  • Add-ons and shared decks. There is no add-on system and no public deck library. Whatever you want has to already be in the app.
  • Editing an individual past review. You can reset a card to new ("Forget"), but you can't reach into its history and fix one entry.
  • Proper phone apps. AnkiDroid and AnkiMobile are excellent. The beta here ships for macOS and Windows; on a phone you get the web version, which reviews but doesn't edit.

Nothing traps you. Any deck can be exported back out as a real .apkg that Anki will open — though the export flattens to one card per note and doesn't re-run Anki's card templates, so a round trip is not byte-for-byte. Keep your original export file until you're sure.

Your first week

  1. Bring one deck, not all of them

    Pick the deck you actually study and import that. If something about the import bothers you, you have found it out on one deck instead of forty.

  2. Study it normally for a few days

    Don't change any settings yet. The defaults are close to Anki's FSRS defaults, and you want a baseline that feels familiar before you start turning knobs.

  3. Then turn on one thing

    Easy days if your week has a fixed busy day. Sessions if starting is the hard part. The semantic features if you have a big collection and suspect it's full of duplicates. One at a time.

  4. Keep syncing both ways

    Until you trust it, keep Anki installed and keep your .apkg. Migrating should be a decision you make after a fortnight, not one you commit to on day one.