Getting started

How to use nodes

This is the whole thing in one page. The first four sections get you from nothing to a working daily habit — that is genuinely all you need, and you can stop reading there. Everything after it is optional and will still be here in a month.

What this is

nodes is a flashcard app. You write a question on one side and the answer on the other, and the app decides when to show each card again — just before you would have forgotten it. That scheduling is the entire point. Reviewing everything every day does not scale past a few hundred cards; reviewing the right twenty does.

A day with it looks like this: you open the app, one deck says it has cards due, you press Start, you answer cards until it says you're done, and you close it. Ten minutes, most days. The app owns the question of what and when; you only ever answer do I know this.

Install it

Desktop is the real app: you can write cards, import, change settings, and study. The web version is for reviewing when you're away from your own machine.

Get your cards in

An empty app does nothing for you, so this is the step that matters. There are three ways in and they are not equally good for everyone.

1. Bring a deck from Anki

   If you already use Anki, this is your route. Export a deck as an .apkg and drag the file onto the nodes window. Your cards, your media, and — importantly — your review history come across, so the scheduler doesn't start from zero on cards you have known for a year.

   The full Anki migration page →

2. Try the demo deck

   A dozen cards that explain the app while you review them. It takes about two minutes and it is the fastest way to understand what a review actually feels like. Delete it afterwards; nothing depends on it.

3. Write your own

   Create a deck, then use the Add tab. Front, back, optional tags, ⌘↩ to save, and the form clears itself for the next one. Tab moves between fields.

   Decks nest with :: — a deck named Anatomy::Upper limb becomes Upper limb inside Anatomy, and studying the parent studies everything under it.

Your first review

Open a deck and press Start. You'll see the front of a card. Try to actually answer it — out loud, or in your head, but commit to an answer before you reveal. Reading the answer without having tried first is the difference between studying and scrolling.

Press Space (or tap the card) to reveal the back. Then you tell the app how it went, and it is asking one question only: how close were you to failing?

Space does double duty: it reveals the answer, and pressing it again on a revealed card is Good. So a session where you know everything is just the spacebar.

Two mistakes to avoid. Don't press Easy to move faster — you're not skipping the card, you're telling the scheduler to hide it for months, and it will believe you. And don't be ashamed of Again; it is not a failure, it is the app finding out something useful. A deck where you never press Again is a deck scheduled too conservatively.

Pressed the wrong one? ⌘Z undoes the last answer.

The daily loop

Every deck shows three numbers, and they are three different things:

• New — cards you have never seen. The app feeds these in gradually rather than all at once.
• Learning — cards you met recently and are still nailing down. These repeat within the same day.
• Review — cards you already know that are due for a check-up. On a settled deck this is most of your day.

When all three hit zero the deck says All caught up and the Start button switches off. That is the app telling you to stop. There is no bonus for studying ahead — a card reviewed early is a card reviewed while you still knew it, which teaches the scheduler nothing and costs you the time.

A new day begins at 4 a.m. by default, not midnight, so a 1 a.m. session still counts as the previous day. You can change that hour in Settings.

Sync is manual on desktop. Press the sync button (or Y) when you want your cards on another device. Your collection lives on your own machine; syncing is what puts a copy in the cloud and pulls in what you did elsewhere.

When you're ready

None of this is needed to use the app. Come back to it when the daily loop is boring and you want more.

Pacing — how a session is shaped

On the deck screen you can swipe between three ways to run a session. Classic studies straight through until the deck is done. Pomodoro works and rests on a timer. Sessions breaks the deck into chunks of N cards with a checkpoint between them — useful when "study the deck" feels too big to start. None of them change scheduling in any way; a card reviewed under one is identical to a card reviewed under another.

Exam practice

A fourth card on that same carousel. Instead of rating your memory, you answer and mark yourself right, wrong, or unsure — and get a score at the end, plus the tags you kept getting wrong. It doesn't touch your review schedule, so you can use it the night before an exam without wrecking anything.

Generate cards

The ✨ button on a deck turns a block of text (or a PDF) into cards. It works in two passes and you are in the middle of both: first it proposes what is worth learning and you untick what isn't, then it writes cards and you approve them one by one. That is deliberate — deciding what matters is where the learning happens, and handing that to a model measurably makes you remember less.

The ✨ on an individual card does a related job: split a card that's secretly three cards, rewrite one that's badly worded, or generate other angles on the same fact so you're not just memorising the first three words of the question.

The knowledge graph

Turn it on in Settings and the app downloads a language model (about 120 MB, once) that runs entirely on your machine — nothing is sent anywhere. After that it can show you which of your other cards are about the same thing, draw them as a graph, and warn you when a card you're writing already exists in the deck.

Easy days

Tell it which days you're busy — every Sunday, or a specific date — and it moves reviews off them in advance instead of letting them pile up. The traffic light next to it tells you honestly how much forgetting the change will cost.

Keyboard shortcuts

Press ⌘/ (or Ctrl/) anywhere in the app for the full, always-current list. The ones worth learning on day one:

When something breaks

"Nodes is damaged and can't be opened"

The quarantine flag. Run the xattr line from the install section. The download is fine.

My cards aren't on my other device

Sync is manual on desktop, and it has to run on both ends: press sync on the machine you studied on, then again on the one you want the cards to appear on.

Images are blank in the browser version

Media from an .apkg import stays on the machine you imported it on until you upload it. In Settings there is a one-off action that mirrors your images to the cloud so the web version can see them.

I can't create an account on the web

Sign-up happens in the desktop app. Install first, register there, and the same account then works on the web.

Anything else

Use Report a bug in the app. It sends the version and the platform along with your description, which saves a round of "which build are you on?". You can also see your version under Settings.