5 · Scheduling, stages & completion

Spaced repetition is really just bookkeeping: each card remembers how well you know it and when to show it next. This chapter is that bookkeeping — the scheduler, the stages, and how a whole deck reaches “done.”

Pick a scheduler with --scheduler or a deck’s % scheduler: directive (it’s deck-level only).

Leitner (default)

A box system. Each card sits at a stage, and each stage has a cooldown before the card comes due again:

Grading moves the card between stages:

• again (fail) → back to stage 1
• good (pass) → up one stage
• easy → up two stages

So a card you keep getting right climbs to longer and longer intervals, and a miss sends it back to the bottom of the ladder. It’s predictable and needs no tuning — a good default.

SM-2

SuperMemo-2 spacing, with a per-card ease factor. Passing grows the interval (roughly 1 day, then 6 days, then interval × ease); the ease nudges up or down with each grade and never drops below 1.3; and a fail sends the card to a short 10-minute relearn. It adapts the spacing to each card’s difficulty instead of using fixed steps. Switching schedulers is safe: SM-2 seeds itself from your existing Leitner progress and keeps the Leitner stage in sync, so you can move between the two without losing your place.

Retiring cards

A card doesn’t climb forever. Once it reaches the top stage (5) by passing, it retires: it rests and is no longer scheduled, not even under --cram, until you alix reset. A deck is finished once all its cards have retired.

Completion states

A deck’s state is derived from its cards’ stages, and shown in the picker and alix stats:

• not started — you haven’t reviewed any card yet
• started — somewhere in between
• finished (done ✓) — every card has retired at the top stage

A deck that declares a % source: adds one state in between — exam due. For those decks, drilling the cards no longer finishes them: passing the AI exam does, which marks the deck mastered. That’s the subject of a later chapter.

Unlocks, in one line

Completion also drives dependencies, with no extra syntax: a deck is locked while any deck it % requires: isn’t finished, so finishing a foundation unlocks what builds on it. The lock is advisory and recomputed live — the dependencies chapter covers it in full.

Cramming

Need to review everything now, schedule be damned — the night before an exam? --cram ignores cooldowns and shows every card that isn’t retired:

alix --cram mydeck.txt

Retired cards stay out (that’s what retirement is for); everything else is fair game regardless of when it’s next due.