Priorities for Flashcards

While Incremental Rem Prioritization helps you manage the intake of new information (articles, PDFs, videos), Flashcard Prioritization helps you manage the retention of what you've already learned.

Standard Spaced Repetition Systems (SRS) treat every due card as equally urgent. If you have 500 due cards, "Card #1" is mathematically just as important as "Card #500". In reality, remembering a core concept for your exam is far more critical than remembering a piece of trivia you added months ago.

This page explains how the plugin allows you to layer a priority system on top of RemNote's standard flashcards.

How It Works

Unlike Incremental Rems, where the plugin completely controls the scheduler, Flashcards live inside RemNote's native database. To manage them, the plugin adds a special powerup (cardPriority) to your Rems.

Priority Sources

Every flashcard in your knowledge base is assigned a priority from 0-100 (Lower = Higher Priority) based on one of three sources:

1. Manual (Highest Strength): You explicitly set a priority for this specific Rem. This overrides everything else.
   • Visual Cue: In the Priority Editor widget, manual priorities appear in bold.
2. Inherited (Medium Strength): If a Rem has no manual priority, it looks up its ancestry tree. It inherits the priority of the nearest ancestor that has:
   • A Manual Flashcard Priority set.
   • OR An Incremental Rem Priority set (this creates a seamless bridge between your reading list and your flashcards).
3. Default (Lowest Strength): If no ancestor has a priority, the card defaults to 50 (or whatever value you set in Settings).

The Inheritance Logic

This is the "magic" that makes the system manageable. You don't need to prioritize every single card.

• Scenario: You are reading a high-priority book (Priority: 10).
• Action: You highlight a sentence and create a flashcard from it.
• Result: That new flashcard automatically inherits Priority 10.
• Benefit: If you decide the whole book is less important later and change the book's priority to 80, all flashcards generated from it update to 80 instantly (unless you manually overrode specific ones or specific branches / chapters / sections).

Setting & Managing Priorities

1. The Unified Priority Widget (Alt+P)

Press Alt+P (or Opt+P) on any Rem to open the Priority Widget. This widget is context-aware and changes based on what you are selecting:

• Inc Rem Section: Appears if the item is an Incremental Rem.
• Flashcard Section: Appears if the item has flashcards.
• Inheritance Section: Appears if the item has neither, but has descendants that could inherit from it.

Handling Conflicts: If a Rem is both an Incremental Rem (reading material) AND has Flashcards, you might want different priorities for each. The widget allows this, but warns you if they diverge, offering buttons to sync them with a single click.

2. Batch Assignment (For Tag Migration)

If you previously used tags like #HighPriority or #P1 to organize your cards, you can migrate to this system in bulk:

1. Focus on the Tag Rem (e.g., #Important).
2. Run the command "Batch Assign Card Priority for tagged rems" (or use the Document Menu item).

3. Set a priority range (e.g., 3-12).
4. The plugin will apply this Manual priority to every Rem tagged with #Important.

• Features of this Dialog:
  • Assign random priorities within a specific range (e.g., 3-12).
  • Intelligently handles IncRems, allowing you to use their existing IncRem priority as their Card Priority.
  • Safely updates rems with existing manual priorities by requiring explicit "Overwrite" confirmation.

The "Queue Problem" & The Solution

This is the most critical concept to understand:

⚠️ RemNote's native flashcard queue DOES NOT respect these priorities.

If you just click "Flashcards" in the sidebar, RemNote will show you cards in its standard SRS order. It does not know about the cardPriority powerup.

The Solution: Priority Review Documents

To review your flashcards in priority order, you must use the Priority Review Document feature.

1. This feature scans your database for due cards.
2. It looks at the priorities you've set (Manual/Inherited).
3. It generates a temporary document containing portals to your Highest Priority Due Cards.
4. You review that temporary document.

This effectively bypasses the native scheduler's "all cards are equal" logic and forces a "best cards first" workflow.

Monitoring Your Load: Card Shield

Just like for reading material, the queue displays a Priority Shield for flashcards (toggleable in settings).

• What it shows: The priority of the most important due card you haven't reviewed yet.
• Interpretation:
  • Shield = P10: You are safe. You've reviewed everything more important than P10.
  • Shield = P1: Danger. You have extremely critical cards pending review. Stop reading new things and clear your cards!

You can view the history of your Card Shield in the "Priority Shield History" graph to track your retention discipline over time.

Maintenance: The "Pre-compute" Command

Because priorities rely heavily on inheritance, changes to a parent (e.g., changing a Folder's priority) need to propagate to thousands of children. To keep RemNote fast, this doesn't always happen instantly for every single card in the background.

Best Practice: Run the command "Pre-compute Card Priorities" regularly (e.g., once a week).

• What it does: It traverses your entire database, recalculates inheritance for every card, and ensures the cache is 100% accurate.
• Why run it: To ensure the few priorities you have manually set in between will be inherited by many other cards, significantly improving the flashcard prioritization based on a few manual inputs that can be inherited by many other flashcards. E.g.:
  • You identify that a chapter of a book / document is very important, and assign to it a priority of 5.
  • This chapter already has many flashcards created, let's say, 80.
  • After this, all NEW cards you create inside that document (as descendants) will have this high priority.
  • But what about the flashcards that you already have? When you run this command, not only the new cards you create will have the high priority of its ancestor, but all cards that were there beforehand (and to which you never manually assigned a priority).
  • Now, when you create a Priority Review Document of this book (or whatever scope that includes this book), the plugin will make sure you review the rems of this valuable chapter first!