Note Types

Notes vs Cards

A note holds the content — the fields you fill in when creating a card (Front, Back, Text, etc.). A card is the study prompt that gets scheduled and shown to you during sessions. One note can produce multiple cards.

For Basic notes, one note always produces exactly one card. For Cloze notes, each {{c1::...}}, {{c2::...}} deletion in the Text field generates its own card — so a single note with three blanks becomes three independently scheduled cards.

This is why the Inspect page has a Notes tab and a Scheduling tab: the Notes tab shows you the content (one row per note), while the Scheduling tab shows you the cards (one row per card, potentially several per note). When you edit, you are always editing the note — the cards derived from it update automatically.

Flipnem Basic Note

Flipnem Basic is Flipnem's standard note type for question-and-answer cards. It works exactly like the Basic note type — Front shown first, tap Show Answer to reveal the Back, then rate your recall — but adds two extra fields for mnemonic support: Mnemonic Text and Mnemonic Rich.

Flipnem Basic is the default note type used when you create or import a new deck.

A Flipnem Basic note has four fields:

The Front and Back fields work identically to a plain Basic card. The mnemonic fields are optional — leaving them empty has no effect on how the card is scheduled or displayed.

When a card has content in either mnemonic field, a Show Mnemonic button appears at the bottom of the study screen. Tapping it overlays the mnemonic on top of the card without affecting the study flow.

Mnemonic Text is a plain-text hint — a sentence, a phrase, a memory cue, or any short note that helps you recall the answer.

Mnemonic Rich is a place for any images or text that would be based off your mnemonic text. For example: you could upload a picture of your own drawing. There is also support for ASCII animation art.

Flipnem Basic is chosen automatically in the following situations:

• When you create a deck and start adding cards through the editor
• When you import a TSV or CSV file — each row becomes a Flipnem Basic note
• When you import a Hashcards file — Q: / A: pairs are stored as Flipnem Basic
• When the AI agent creates cards via an AI-managed deck

If Flipnem Basic is not present in your collection for any reason, the system falls back to plain Basic.

The plain Basic note type has two fields (Front and Back). Flipnem Basic is identical to Basic for scheduling, study flow, and Anki compatibility — the extra fields are invisible to the scheduler. The only difference is the optional mnemonic overlay during study.

Flipnem Basic decks are fully supported with encryption. All four fields — including Mnemonic Text and Mnemonic Rich — are encrypted together and never stored in plaintext on the server.

When exporting you can choose whether to include your mnemonic fields or not. When you import into Anki Desktop, Anki sees a notetype with four fields and a single card template — the mnemonic fields appear as extra fields in the note editor and are otherwise ignored by Anki.

Basic

A Basic card has a Front and a Back — the classic flashcard format.

During study, the front is shown first. Tap Show Answer to reveal the back, then rate your recall.

Best for straightforward question-and-answer pairs: vocabulary, dates, definitions, and similar facts where a single prompt has a single answer.

Basic (and reversed card)

Creates two cards from one note — one with Front→Back and one with Back→Front. Both cards are scheduled independently.

Best for bidirectional knowledge: you want to recognize a word given its definition and produce the word given a definition.

Cloze

A Cloze card presents a sentence with one or more words blanked out. Each blank becomes an independent card — a single note can generate multiple study prompts.

When writing your own cloze cards, use the Hashcards square-bracket syntax — wrap each blank in square brackets:

C: The [mitochondria] is the [powerhouse] of the cell.

This generates two cards:

• Card 1: "The ___ is the powerhouse of the cell." → mitochondria
• Card 2: "The mitochondria is the ___ of the cell." → powerhouse

No numbering required — each bracketed phrase becomes a separate cloze deletion.

If you are importing from Anki, the standard {{c1::}} syntax is also supported.

Cloze cards are ideal for definitions, fill-in-the-blank sentences, and memorizing facts embedded in context.

Source Note

A Source Note is a special note type that holds reference material — text you want to keep alongside a deck but never schedule for review. Source Notes have no card template, so they never appear in Study or Review sessions. They live in the deck as pure content.

Source Notes serve two purposes:

1. Quick lookup. When you are building or reviewing a deck, you can open the Source viewer (📜 on the deck or in Deck Details) to read the original material without leaving Flipnem. No switching tabs or hunting for the document.

2. AI Managed decks. When a deck is AI-managed, the AI assistant reads the Source Notes to understand what material it should be creating cards from. The Source Note is the contract between you and the agent — it tells the agent exactly what you want learned, so the cards it generates stay grounded in your specific text.

Source Notes work well for any material where the original wording matters:

• Recitations — poems, speeches, prayers, oaths, lyrics. You want to memorize exact phrasing, so you keep the full text as a Source Note and build cloze or fill-in-the-blank cards from it.
• Passages — a chapter excerpt, a legal definition, a historical document. Source Notes let the AI build comprehension cards from the actual text rather than a paraphrase.
• Reference tables — conjugation tables, periodic table sections, anatomical lists. The table stays in the Source Note; the cards test individual facts from it.
• Lecture notes or outlines — paste in your own notes as a Source Note, then let the agent generate cards for each key point.

Internally, a Source Note uses the Source note type. It has two fields: Title and Text. Because there is no card template attached to this note type, the Flipnem scheduler never creates a card from it — it cannot be scheduled, due, suspended, or buried. It is invisible to the study queue entirely.

Source Notes are visible in:

• The Source viewer (📜), which renders the full text with your deck's display preferences (font, size, background color)
• Deck Details, which lists each Source Note by title with a link to the viewer
• The AI agent, which reads them when generating cards

To add a Source Note:

1. Open the deck's ⋯ menu and go to Inspect Cards (or use the Edit button from Deck Details).
2. Click Add Card.
3. In the Note Type dropdown, select Source.
4. Fill in the Title field (used as the display name in Deck Details and the viewer).
5. Paste or type your material into the Text field.
6. Click Save.

The Source Note appears immediately in the deck's Deck Details page and Source viewer. No cards are created.

Source Notes can also be created via Hashcards import using the S: syntax.

Source Notes travel with a shared deck. When a Scholar user shares a deck that contains Source Notes, the full text of each Source Note is included in the share snapshot. The recipient receives both the cards and the source material.

Source Notes are included in .apkg exports. The export contains the full Source note type definition — fields (Title, Text) and the absence of a card template — so the notes round-trip cleanly. When you import the .apkg back into Flipnem, the Source Notes are restored exactly as exported. When you import into Anki Desktop, Anki might schedule the source notes — if that happens you can suspend that card.