Recall Garden

Recall Garden (忆园) is an Obsidian study system for active recall, spaced repetition, structured Markdown cards, AI-assisted study packs, and note verification.

It is designed for any subject. The plugin does not assume a specific school, exam, profession, or knowledge domain.

Features

• FSRS-6 spaced-repetition scheduling with configurable retention and review limits.
• Structured eight-section study cards for concepts, comparisons, and applied problems.
• Daily review queues, study calendar, exam countdown, diagnostics, snapshots, and recoverable review history.
• AI-generated study packs containing a 30-second answer, missing sections, cloze questions, a four-option discrimination question, and comparison questions.
• A complete preview of every generated item and the final Markdown before anything is written back.
• Safe managed blocks that preserve handwritten content and existing question-bank answer state.
• AI note verification with saved reports and guarded, per-issue corrections.
• No telemetry, advertisements, or automatic AI requests.

Card format

New cards use this frontmatter marker:

---
type: recall-card
subject: Biology
module: Cell Biology
topic: Photosynthesis
---

Recall Garden also recognizes the legacy values study-card, 学习卡, and 名词解释 for backward compatibility.

A review card needs a standard-answer section and a 30-second-answer section. The built-in card creator generates a complete eight-section template.

Installation

Community directory

After the plugin is approved, install Recall Garden from Obsidian's Community plugins directory.

Manual installation

1. Download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from a GitHub release whose tag matches the manifest version.
2. Place the files in <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/recall-garden/.
3. Reload Obsidian and enable Recall Garden under Community plugins.

For pre-directory testing, the repository can also be installed through BRAT.

AI providers

AI features are disabled by default. Users explicitly choose and configure a provider:

• DeepSeek API: uses a user-provided API key stored through Obsidian SecretStorage.
• ChatGPT Codex device login: an optional compatibility channel using a plugin-specific OAuth session. This channel uses an upstream interface that is not a stable public OpenAI API and may stop working when the service changes.

No AI provider is contacted during startup, vault scanning, scheduling, ordinary review, or diagnostics. A request is sent only after the user clicks an AI action.

Read PRIVACY.md before enabling an AI provider.

Data safety

• Review data uses Obsidian's plugin data API.
• API keys and OAuth tokens use Obsidian SecretStorage and are excluded from snapshots.
• Stable card IDs preserve review history across file renames.
• Unknown newer data schemas enter read-only protection instead of overwriting data.
• AI write-back uses Vault.process, verifies that the source has not changed since preview, and modifies only explicit managed regions or uniquely matched corrections.
• Production releases contain no developer Vault path, local deployment configuration, or user data.

Development

Requirements: Node.js 20 or newer and npm.

npm ci
npm test
npm run check
npm run build

The build creates a minified main.js. Obsidian release assets are:

• main.js
• manifest.json
• styles.css

main.js is intentionally not committed to the repository; it is attached to GitHub releases.

Release policy

• The GitHub release tag must exactly match manifest.json's version, without a v prefix.
• Source, lockfile, tests, manifest, versions.json, and release notes are committed.
• Built assets are uploaded to the matching GitHub release.
• Schema changes must preserve stable IDs, scheduling history, archived cards, and saved AI questions.

License

Recall Garden is released under the MIT License. Third-party attribution is listed in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.

Contributing and security

See CONTRIBUTING.md for development guidelines. Please report security problems according to SECURITY.md, not through a public issue.