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Kioku

The review queue

The queue is the ordered set of Topics and Items due in a session, woven together so that flashcard recall and incremental reading happen side by side rather than in separate sittings.

Most spaced-repetition tools give you one queue of flashcards. Kioku gives you one queue that mixes two kinds of work: the Items that are due for recall, and the Topics and Extracts that are due for re-reading. Interleaving them is deliberate: reading feeds new Extracts and Items into the system, and reviewing those Items reinforces what you read, so doing both in one pass keeps the incremental reading loop turning.

What lands in the queue

Section titled “What lands in the queue”

When a session starts, Kioku assembles the queue from what is currently due.

An Item is due when it is brand new or when its scheduled due time has passed. New Items count as due regardless of any date, so the queue is never purely date-driven — fresh Items you just created can appear right away, up to a per-session cap.

A Topic or Extract is due when it has not been scheduled yet or when its due time has passed. For reading material, “not yet scheduled” means due now, not never — a newly imported Topic is immediately eligible for its first read.

A couple of housekeeping steps run before the queue is built. Kioku first releases any Items that were buried (temporarily hidden), so burying an Item hides it only for the remainder of the current session, not the next one. It then quietly defers low-priority reading when you have more overdue Topics than a day’s reading allowance, so a backlog of reading doesn’t bury your recall work. Concepts never enter the queue at all — they are a way to group related material in Browse and have no review behavior of their own.

Ordering and limits

Section titled “Ordering and limits”

The queue is not a flat to-do list. Kioku interleaves the two kinds of content, and the default rhythm gives every sitting a steady mix of recall and reading rather than letting reading clump at the front or the back of a session.

Within that rhythm, higher-priority material comes first — ahead of due date. A high-priority newer Item can therefore precede an older, more overdue one.

The session is bounded so it stays finishable:

  • A review limit caps how many cards and Topics a session draws (100 by default).
  • A new-Item limit caps how many never-seen Items are introduced (20 by default), so a burst of new flashcards can’t flood a single session.
  • A topic ratio target (about 30% reading by default) shapes how much of the queue is reading material.

These are defaults; the limits, the ratio, and the review rhythm are tunable. You can pick a rhythm that keeps a steady reading cadence, one that holds reading closer to your chosen ratio, or one that merges everything into a single priority-ordered list. Reading also has its own daily allowance, which is what drives the deferral step described above.

Topics versus Items

Section titled “Topics versus Items”

The queue presents both kinds of content in one stream, but they are scheduled differently and you respond to them in different ways.

Items are flashcards scheduled by FSRS. You reveal the answer, then give a Rating — 1 = Again, 2 = Hard, 3 = Good, or 4 = Easy — and Kioku computes the next interval from how well you recalled the Item. Ratings of Good or Easy count as a hit; Again or Hard count as a miss.

Topics and Extracts are scheduled separately, and there is nothing to reveal. Instead you choose a Topic action — read, extract, skip, or done. Each reschedules the Topic on its own cadence: reading or extracting pushes it further out before you see it again, skip brings it back sooner, and done dismisses the Topic from the queue while keeping the Extracts and Items you made from it. Topic actions are not graded for accuracy and, unlike an Item Rating, cannot be undone.

Because reading and recall are handled separately, only Items contribute to a session’s accuracy. Working through a reading Topic advances your progress count but never moves the accuracy figure.

For the keys, controls, and the moment-to-moment flow of working a session, see the reviewing guide.

Section titled “Related”