flash

A terminal flashcard quiz program written in C.

This is a learning project, built while following Beej's Guide to C Programming (up to chapter 9).

Use at your own risk.

What it does

• Loads a deck of flashcards from a plain text file
• Shuffles the deck (unless --no-shuffle is given)
• Quizzes you one card at a time: shows the question, waits for Enter, then reveals the answer and asks whether you got it right
• Repeats the cards you got wrong until you've cleared the deck
• Shows your score and (optionally) logs the session to flash.log
• On startup, summarises your past sessions for that deck (number of sessions, average and best score)

Build

make

Usage

flash [--no-shuffle] [-h|--help] <deck-file>

Examples:

flash decks/cards.txt
flash --no-shuffle ~/deck.txt

Deck file format

Cards are plain text. A question line, an answer line, then a --- separator:

What does sizeof return for an array parameter inside a function?
The size of the pointer it decayed to, not the original array size.
---
Why does fgetc return int rather than char?
So EOF (typically -1) is distinguishable from any valid character value.
---

Blank lines are ignored, and leading/trailing whitespace is trimmed. A deck can hold up to 100 cards (MAX_DECK_SIZE).

Project layout

flash.c         entry point
lib/cards.c     deck loading, shuffling, quizzing a single card
lib/score.c     scoring, session logging, startup summary
lib/term.c      drawing cards centered in the terminal, reading y/n & Enter
lib/alt_buf.c   alternate screen buffer handling
lib/utils.c     argument parsing, line validation and sanitization
flash.log       log of past sessions

Notes

• The program switches to the terminal's alternate screen buffer on start (the same trick vim and less use) and restores your screen on exit via an atexit handler, so your scrollback is left untouched.
• Cards are drawn centered using the terminal size from ioctl(TIOCGWINSZ).
• Session history is parsed back out of flash.log with strtok to compute the startup summary.

Known Issues

• If the program is killed abruptly (e.g. Ctrl-C), the cleanup that re-shows the cursor never runs, so your terminal cursor stays hidden. Restore it with:

  printf '\033[?25h'