Cosimo

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Cosimo

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Cosimo is a desktop application for studying cards. A card has a prompt, such as a word, question, or sentence, and a response, such as a translation, answer, or explanation. During a study session Cosimo shows the prompt, lets you reveal the response, asks how well you remembered it, and then schedules the card for a future session.

This is useful for material that benefits from repeated active recall: vocabulary, factual knowledge, short definitions, grammar examples, command meanings, or any other item where you can decide whether your answer was right.

Cosimo is designed as a native Windows-first application with keyboard and screen-reader accessibility treated as core requirements. It is currently in beta and is manually tested on Windows with NVDA as part of the release process.

How Studying Works

Cosimo uses spaced repetition. That means cards come back when it is becoming useful to see them again: sooner when you miss them or find them difficult, and later when you remember them easily. You do not have to manage dates yourself.

A normal study session works like this:

  1. Choose Start to study cards that are available now.
  2. Read the prompt and optionally rate how confident you are before seeing the response.
  3. Reveal the response.
  4. Rate your recall: again, hard, good, or easy.
  5. Cosimo records the attempt and updates the next scheduled review.

You can also force a longer unscheduled session, study only flagged cards, or run an exam-style session that samples active cards without changing the schedule.

What Cosimo Provides

Cosimo is aimed at learners who want a small, controllable, portable study tool rather than a web service. Deck content stays in files you can inspect, copy, back up, and edit outside the program if needed.

Download

Get the current Windows release candidate, 0.1.11-rc.1.

Cosimo is portable: expand the zip file into the folder where you want to run it, then start cosimo.exe from that folder. Upgrading normally means expanding a newer zip over the old program files; user deck files and review databases are separate from the program files.

The latest Linux amd64 sync-server package is cosimo-sync-linux-x86_64.tar.gz. It is server-only and contains cosimo-sync-cgi, cosimo-sync-server, deployment documentation, and checksums.

Download for Mac

An experimental contributor-maintained macOS port for Apple Silicon Macs, created by @johann@dragonscave.space, is available as Cosimo_mac.zip. It is separate from the Windows release line and may lag behind the current Windows build.

It is unsigned and not notarised, so macOS Gatekeeper may warn before opening it. As limitations, audio generation for decks doesn't work, since it is based on Windows APIs, and the Mac equivalent to minimisation to system tray isn't working yet. It has been tested with VoiceOver by the contributor, but it is experimental and further testing is welcome. SHA-256: eaf49dec692bda2f515df3f3e6929b0bbca44616137a4f205bf1322c140e1576.

Thanks a lot to Johann for this port.

Release candidate

Cosimo 0.1.11-rc.1 is the current release candidate. It includes faster ready-list navigation and menu opening, safer single-instance profile locking, basic Anki import with MP3 playback, a daily new-card intake limit for large or imported decks, browser-based sync registration and device authorisation, account deletion, stronger sync upload hardening and diagnostics, progress reporting for bundle and sync operations, clearer dashboard counts, and exam blank-answer review corrections.

Beta releases

Beta archives are kept as static files from beta 5 onward. Earlier archives remain available as beta 5, beta 6, beta 7, beta 8, beta 9, beta 10, and beta 11.

Release notes are kept in the changelog.

Documentation

Accessibility

The study flow uses native controls where practical, supports keyboard-first operation, and is tested with a screen reader. Accessibility regressions are treated as blocking defects.

The current known non-blocking issues are that the ready-list control can announce the selected item twice, and that an empty ready list may be announced as "unknown" on the target Windows/NVDA stack. Navigation and study operation remain functional; the ready summary and filter count remain the reliable empty-state indicators.

The accessibility acceptance notes are in docs/accessibility-acceptance.md.

Beta History

Source

The project is written in Rust and uses wxdragon over wxWidgets for the GUI. This repository uses Fossil, not Git. To clone it:

fossil clone https://modulus.isonomia.net/cosimo.cgi cosimo.fossil
mkdir cosimo
cd cosimo
fossil open ../cosimo.fossil

Reporting Bugs

Bug reports are handled with Fossil tickets on this site. Anonymous users can report bugs:

  1. Open the Cosimo Fossil site.
  2. Use the login link and log in as anonymous.
  3. Use the button on the login page to autofill the captcha.
  4. Create a new ticket.

Useful reports include the Cosimo version, operating system, what you were doing, what happened, and what you expected to happen. For accessibility issues, please also mention the screen reader and version.

Licence

Cosimo is released under the GNU General Public Licence version 3.