I want to share a Flashcard and Incremental Reading plugin I’ve been polishing recently called Syro.
It’s a brand-new project, and I’m hoping to find some early adopters here in the Obsidian community to test it out and give some real feedback.
Before diving into the features, let’s talk about the design philosophy. We all know Spaced Repetition fights forgetting. But when we shred our notes to export them into apps like Anki, we often lose the original context (the “island effect”). If you forget a card during review, the mental disconnect is jarring.
I built Syro to fix this. Its core philosophy is “preserve context.” (In the settings, you can even choose to grab the entire note as the context for a flashcard—though for performance, Syro offers plenty of customizable context-grabbing rules to suit your needs).
In short, here’s what Syro does:
Context-Aware Flashcards:
Fully compatible with native Obsidian MD syntax. Create cloze deletions or Q&A cards right inline without breaking your formatting. You can easily trace back to the exact context of any card.
(Note: It should theoretically be compatible with cards from the older “Spaced Repetition” plugin, though you might lose your review history).
Incremental Reading:
Toss dozens of books, articles, or long web clips into the right-sidebar “Review Queue.” Too cluttered? Filter them by tags. Don’t want to read it today? Swipe it away and let the FSRS algorithm schedule it for later (or manually pick a date—a new feature I just added).
(Combined with plugins like Epub Importer, reading massive books simultaneously in Obsidian is a breeze).
Timeline (Like Git Commits):
Read halfway through a long article and getting tired? Syro saves your scroll percentage. Next time the article pops up, click the timeline to jump right back to where you left off. You can even leave “commit messages” to remind your future self of your reading context.
Modern UI Design:
I care a lot about UI, so I tried my best to make it look native and clean in your vault. (If you think it’s ugly, I apologize in advance!). It also supports the Style Settings plugin for basic customizations, with more coming soon.
I also want to be 100% transparent with you all: Syro uses a “Core Free + Supporter Edition” model.
Please rest assured, the free version is NOT a half-baked trial. The FSRS algorithm, unlimited flashcards, and the incremental reading queue are completely free and open. The Supporter Edition only covers hardcore/niche needs (like multi-ID cloze nesting, Codeblock/LaTeX cloze parsing, and infinite Timeline history limits).
It’s an attempt to keep the project alive long-term. If you find the core version useful, buying me a coffee for a key would be awesome. But honestly, if you really want to try the pro features but don’t want to buy it right now, just DM me and I’ll send you an early-bird key.
Since it’s in its early stages, there are definitely bugs I haven’t caught or UX flows that could be better. If this sounds like something you’d use, please give it a try.
Any roasts, bug reports, or feature suggestions are super welcome in the replies or via GitHub Issues. Also, if you find it useful, a star on GitHub would mean the world to me (stars are my main motivation to keep coding right now, haha).
