The AnkiDote

A medical reference sidebar for Anki. It highlights the conditions, drugs and clinical vocabulary already written on your cards, explains them on hover, and puts StatPearls, DrugBank, UpToDate and an AI chat one keystroke away without leaving the reviewer.

Built for Australian medical students, so drug names, units and spelling follow Australian conventions and clinical content is checked against Australian guidance first.

The reference library is a separate file from the add-on and updates itself over a content channel, so a corrected dose or a stale threshold reaches you without an AnkiWeb release.

What it does

Reference popups

Terms on the current card are underlined. Hovering one shows a summary; clicking opens the source.

Seven databases are matched:

The descriptive and signs databases exist because the gap was the wrong way round. Cards were resolving dermatomyositis and not poikiloderma, telangiectasia, myalgia or pathognomonic - but a reader who already knows the disease name reads past it either way, and one who doesn't is usually stuck on the descriptive word, because it is the part of the sentence carrying the finding.

Abbreviations are read in context. Where a key carries more than one sense, the rest of the card decides which one the popup shows, and fourteen acronyms that are also ordinary English words - OR, ALL, PET, CAP, AS among them - are left alone unless the card gives a reason to read them as an acronym. When the expansion resolves to a condition the popup carries that condition's whole summary, titled under both, as "HTN - Hypertension".

A term is underlined in the words your card uses, not the library's: heart attack underlines where you wrote it, and the popup opens under Myocardial infarction. A phrase still matches when a tag runs through it, so <b>ectopic</b> pregnancy is one term rather than two halves.

You can add your own terms under Settings → General → Custom terms. They are matched ahead of everything shipped, so a term you define wins over the library's reading of it.

What a popup carries

About 2,800 conditions carry a written summary rather than a first paragraph lifted from an article: definition, aetiology, investigations, management, red flags, Australian notes, PBS status and the rest of a fixed list of section labels. Most of those headings are clickable and open the article at that heading.

147 entries open a named document instead of a search. 95 point at an Australian source - RANZCOG, Safer Care Victoria, KEMH, RACGP, the Immunisation Handbook, STI Guidelines Australia, ANZCOR, NHMRC, the TGA - and 52 at a specific StatPearls chapter. The popup's button says which, so you know what you are about to open before you open it.

2,800 conditions also carry UpToDate searches, 4,288 of them, as green pills under the summary. They need your own subscription.

Six accent colours say where a popup came from, including one for summaries written for this add-on that have no chapter behind them, so the badge is not the only thing distinguishing them.

Hovering is intent-based rather than instant: a mark has to hold the pointer for 70 ms before it takes over from an open popup, and a pointer travelling towards that popup keeps it for up to 600 ms whatever it passes over. Double-clicking or dragging a selection across an underlined term copies the word rather than opening anything.

Where a click lands

Open sources in, under Settings → General, chooses between the sidebar and your browser. It applies to whatever the sidebar can host: StatPearls, DrugBank, abbreviations, and custom terms pointing at a host the add-on already trusts. Everything else opens in your normal browser, which is most of the rest: the Wikipedia databases above, and the Australian guideline sites behind the 147 named sources. UpToDate links always open in the UpToDate dock.

Links written into your own cards are checked against the same host list before anything opens. An unrecognised one goes to your browser rather than into a dock holding your institutional session.

The docks

Three separate docks, side by side, each with its own toggle. All three can be open at once.

• StatPearls / DrugBank - reference browsing, with pills to switch between the two. Popup articles open here. Terms are underlined and explained on article pages too, exactly as they are on cards. A search that resolves to a single match jumps straight to it, DrugBank's signup banner is hidden and so is NCBI's Bookshelf bar over the search page, and the dock reopens on the article you left it on.
• UpToDate - your own institutional subscription, signed into once and remembered. Set your entry URL under Settings → Services if your institution uses an SSO proxy. The session is kept alive while you are actually using Anki, and when it expires anyway the dock opens itself at the login page rather than failing quietly. With the dock open, each new card searches for its front field.
• AI chat - your existing browser session with Claude, Perplexity, ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, DeepSeek, Grok or Duck. No API key, no account of ours, nothing is sent anywhere on its own. A self-hosted endpoint can be added as a ninth. A CSS rule hides the upgrade banners.

Ctrl+Shift+K sends the current text selection to the chat and Ctrl+Shift+J sends the whole visible card: the dock opens, the message box is focused, and the text is pasted through Qt's own paste so the site's editor handles it the way it handles yours. Nothing is submitted - pressing Enter is always your keystroke.

Relevant articles

The dock lists articles matching terms found on the current card, ranked by how central each term is to it: whether it appears in the card's first field, how often, how early, and how specific it is. Only conditions and drugs are listed. The other databases are underlined on the card but have no article to offer.

It is a guess, so its header collapses to a strip you can click to bring it back. That is a judgement about the list rather than about one card, so it is remembered until you expand it again.

Reference database

The term library ships inside the add-on and works offline. It also updates itself, because the thing you would most want corrected quickly is a wrong dose or a superseded threshold, and an AnkiWeb release is the wrong unit for that.

Once per Anki launch, on a background thread, the add-on fetches a small manifest from GitHub. Only if that manifest advertises newer content built for a schema this version understands does it download the library itself. What arrives is checked against the sha256 and the byte count the manifest declares, parsed as JSON, validated for structure, and required to carry the version the manifest advertised, before any of it is kept. Anything that fails is discarded in favour of the copy you already have.

A new library takes effect at the next Anki launch rather than mid session: the matcher is built once at import, and swapping the data under a running reviewer would leave the two disagreeing.

Settings → General → Reference database holds the switch, the version in use, and a Check now button. Turned off, the add-on makes no content request at all.

Install

From AnkiWeb, or download the .ankiaddon from Releases and open it with Anki.

Qt 6 is required. The package installs from Anki 2.1.50 upwards and the code is kept compatible with it, but development is against current Anki, so that is where it is exercised. Some features need newer Qt: the dark rendering of reference pages needs Qt 6.7+, and degrades to normal light pages below that.

Shortcuts

macOS maps Ctrl to ⌘, so these appear as ⌘⇧S and so on.

All of them are editable under Settings → Shortcuts: click a field, press the keys you want, and the new binding applies as soon as you close the window. Clear a field to disable that shortcut. Restore defaults is there if you lose one, and clashing bindings are flagged.

These bindings are global, so that they work while the reviewer holds focus in a webview. That rules two things out. Escape cannot be bound, with or without a modifier, and neither can a bare key without one, which would fire while you were typing. Either would be taken from Anki everywhere. A field set to one is left at its previous value, and one saved by an older version is cleared at the next launch, with a message saying which binding went and why.

Settings

Tools → The AnkiDote → Settings, in four tabs:

• General - which modules are active, reference-popup behaviour and custom terms, the reference database switch with the version in use and a Check now button, toolbar button order, and whether the docks reopen at the next Anki launch.
• Services - UpToDate institution URL, AI chat provider and paste behaviour.
• Shortcuts - every binding, editable.
• Advanced - verbose logging, the diagnostic log, and a web inspector for the sidebar webviews.

Everything writes on close, matching Anki's own Preferences. Every setting also has a config key; see config.md.

A welcome dialog runs once on a fresh install and can be run again from Tools → The AnkiDote.

Privacy

• No telemetry. Nothing is collected, and there is no server of ours to collect it.
• No API keys. The AI chat is your own browser session in an embedded webview. Cookies persist so you sign in once per provider.
• No message submission. The send-to-chat shortcuts copy, focus the message box and paste. They never press Enter.
• Your collection stays local. Card text is read to find terms and is never transmitted anywhere.
• Network access covers the sites you are browsing - StatPearls, DrugBank, UpToDate and your chosen chat provider - plus NCBI when resolving an article link.
• The reference database adds GitHub, on by default: raw.githubusercontent.com for the manifest, and github.com with release-assets.githubusercontent.com for the library file it points at, downloaded only when the manifest advertises a newer one. objects.githubusercontent.com is accepted as well, since that is where the file used to be served from. The requests are plain HTTPS GETs carrying nothing about you, and turning the switch off under Settings → General → Reference database stops them entirely.

Known limitations

• Passkey and Touch ID sign-in do not work in an embedded webview. This is a macOS restriction affecting every Anki sidebar add-on. Use a password with 2FA; cookies persist, so it is once per provider.
• DrugBank sits behind Cloudflare. A search may pause on a bot check. The panel waits it out rather than interrupting it, but a check that never clears has to be finished in your normal browser.
• UpToDate needs your own subscription. The add-on provides no content of its own.
• The article list is a guess. It is ranked, not authoritative.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests: github.com/mord58562/theankidote

Bug reports are much easier to act on with a diagnostic log: turn on Settings → Advanced → Verbose logging, reproduce the problem, then use Show log.

Tests live in tests/ and run with plain python3 - no Anki required:

python3 tests/test_security.py      # untrusted content, updater, URL trust
python3 tests/test_vocab.py         # database integrity, popup height budget
python3 tests/test_library.py       # library validation, publishing contract
python3 tests/test_reviewer.py      # matching, marking, popup payloads
python3 tests/test_toolbar_order.py

Run them as scripts rather than under pytest: collection imports __init__.py, which imports aqt at module scope, and every file errors out before a test runs.

The suite is deliberately small and covers one thing: defects that do not announce themselves. A broken phrase matcher is obvious on the next card; a summary that quietly joins the scrolling backlog, an override baked into its own base text, or a URL that Python and Chromium parse differently are not. Tests that restated the implementation were removed at 2.2.

Changelog

Every release is in CHANGELOG.md. The current version's notes are also in WHATS-NEW-2.8.0.md, which ships inside the add-on.

Licence

GPL-3.0-or-later. See LICENSE.

Clinical content is compiled from public sources and is intended for study. It is not a clinical decision tool and carries no warranty - check current guidance before acting on anything you read here.

Version history is in CHANGELOG.md.