8 · Workspaces

As your decks multiply, you’ll want to treat a cluster of them as a unit — all your Spanish decks, or every deck about one codebase. A workspace is that unit: a folder of decks reviewed together, sharing settings and a name, with its own progress.

Making a workspace

Any folder of .txt decks becomes a workspace the moment you drop a alix.toml in it — a scoped version of the global config file. It sets a title and a [defaults] table of directives that every deck in the folder inherits:

# ~/decks/spanish/alix.toml
title = "Spanish"

[defaults]
direction = "both"
mode = "typing"

Now review the whole cluster at once:

alix review ~/decks/spanish/

Shared directives

The [defaults] keys are exactly the deck-directive names from the deck format — mode, direction, scheduler, and the rest. They fill in only what a deck doesn’t set for itself, so the precedence is one level deeper than before:

CLI flag > card % > deck % > workspace [defaults] > built-in default

Set direction = "both" once for the whole folder, and a single irregular deck can still override it with its own % direction: forward. It’s the same directive system from chapter 3, just sourced from one more place.

Its own progress

A workspace keeps its progress inside the folder, in a progress.json next to the decks (override the location with a store = "..." line in the alix.toml), separate from the global store that loose decks share. That makes a workspace a self-contained, portable unit: its decks, its assets/ (frozen trace excerpts — covered with traces later), and its history all live in one folder you can move, copy, or share, with its progress isolated from everything else. Decks outside any workspace keep using the global store; --store <path> overrides either.

In the picker

Folders show up in the picker (terminal and web) in two flavors: a folder with a alix.toml appears under Workspaces, one without as a plain Folder. Opening either drills in to its decks, drawn as a dependency tree — each deck nested under the prerequisite that gates it, foundations at the roots (the next chapter). Each row is badged · deck · or · trace ·, and the drill-in is a single-launch list: Enter on a facts deck reviews it, Enter on a trace walks it. Typing a filter flattens the tree to a plain search.

alix workspace <dir> jumps straight into that drill-in view, routing each member to the right experience — a facts deck to a review, a trace to a walk — and returning you to the picker when you finish one. (alix review <dir>, by contrast, flattens the whole folder into one merged review, so trace decks get quizzed as plain cards — usually not what you want for a workspace that holds traces.)

A folder without a manifest is still reviewable with alix review <folder>; it just applies no shared directives.

Titles

A title in the alix.toml — or a % title: directive on a single deck — gives a display name, shown in the picker, the session header, alix list, and alix stats, instead of the file name. It’s display-only: you still refer to decks by file path on the command line, and a title never affects a card’s identity.