Cocoa Notes vs Anki

Where Anki wins, honestly

Let us not pretend otherwise. Anki is a remarkable piece of software and it is free on desktop.

• The scheduler is better. FSRS is a serious, well-researched algorithm tuned on enormous amounts of real review data. Cocoa uses Leitner-style scheduling, which is simpler and good enough for a semester, but it is not in the same league for multi-year retention.
• It runs everywhere and syncs. Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, web. Cocoa Notes is macOS only.
• Shared decks. Thousands of them, already made, some of them excellent.
• Card types, cloze deletion, image occlusion, add-ons. Anki's flexibility for how a card works is far beyond Cocoa's.
• Twenty years of refinement, and a free desktop app.

If you are in medical school, Anki plus a good shared deck is probably still the answer. This page is not arguing with that.

The problem Anki does not solve

Anki starts at the moment you have cards. Everything before that — deciding what matters, writing the front, writing the back, getting it into a deck — is manual labour, and it is exactly where most people quit.

The usual student loop looks like this:

1. Take notes in a lecture.
2. Highlight the important parts while reading them back.
3. Open Anki.
4. Re-type the highlighted parts into cards, one at a time, at midnight.
5. Do steps 1–3 the following week and never do step 4 again.

Step 2 already told a computer which parts mattered. Then the information is thrown away, and step 4 asks you to supply it again by hand.

What Cocoa Notes does instead

In Cocoa, a highlighter has a name and a setting. You define pens — Formulas, Terminology, Dates, On the Exam — and mark text with them while you read, which is something you were doing anyway.

Pens set to make cards feed the study system directly. Make a flashcard set, choose which pens it draws from, and Cocoa collects every term you marked with them. Click a term, the note opens at that exact word, and you drag across the meaning to set the back of the card. Then:

• Recall sessions with Again / Good / Easy, scheduling what you keep missing.
• Quizzes — multiple choice and written, marked as you answer.
• Exams — marked at the end, with a warning before you leave.
• Your own questions added alongside the generated ones.

The authoring step does not disappear entirely: you still choose which words are the answer. But the difference between "drag across the definition you already wrote" and "retype the term and its definition into a separate app" is the difference between a task you do and a task you keep postponing.

The other half: cards stay attached to the note

An Anki card is a standalone object. When you get one wrong, you get a card wrong. You cannot see the paragraph it came from without going to find it.

A Cocoa card remembers where it came from. During recall, Open the Note jumps to the exact sentence, in the chapter, on the page, in context, with everything around it that made it make sense the first time. For conceptual material — as opposed to raw vocabulary — that context is often the thing you actually needed.

Side by side

Using both

This is a genuinely good setup and worth spelling out. Take notes and highlight in Cocoa. Study inside Cocoa during the semester, where recall, quizzes and exams are right next to the material.

For the subjects you need to hold for years rather than months, export the collection of a card-making pen as Markdown and convert it into an Anki deck. You get Cocoa's authoring speed and Anki's long-horizon scheduler, and the source of truth stays in your own files either way.