Personal note / 002
Make the answer
come from memory.
FlashTerm is a terminal study tool built around one small distinction: recognizing an answer is easier than producing it.
I can look at a word on a flashcard, see four possible answers, and feel sure I know it. Ask me to type the answer with the options gone, and that confidence gets tested. FlashTerm starts at that gap.
Recognition and recall
The main interaction is plain: show a prompt, wait for a typed answer, then reveal the result. There is no multiple choice and no button for “I probably knew that.” If I cannot produce the answer, I have found something to review.
That makes a study session a little less comfortable, but much more informative. The tool is intentionally small enough that the question stays in front of me rather than getting buried under the interface.
A deliberate constraint
FlashTerm runs in a terminal and uses plain-text decks. It is a C++17 application with no third-party dependencies. I like that a deck is something I can keep, edit, and move without an account or a service standing between me and the material.
The focused interaction is the core, but real study has edges: a typo should not always count as forgetting, some prompts need a hint, and sometimes I need to undo a mistaken review. Those details make a simple idea feel usable day to day.
The review loop
Cards move through five boxes with longer gaps between reviews: one, three, seven, fourteen, then thirty days. The schedule gives a concrete answer to “what should I review next?” without asking me to manage it by hand.
The boxes are a practical structure, not a promise that learning follows a perfect calendar. The important thing is returning to an answer after enough time has passed that I actually have to retrieve it again.
What I keep learning
FlashTerm began as a straightforward terminal tool and grew more complex as I added the details around a review session. That has been part of the lesson too: even a small application has to make choices about files, feedback, mistakes, and what the user sees next.
I keep coming back to the same principle while working on it: make the useful action easy to repeat. In this case, that action is answering from memory.
End of note More to learn.