A way to download shared Anki decks

Today I downloaded Anki as a result of a discussion at Hacker News. When I attempted to download a deck (none are built-in), I consistently got errors — complaints about bad ZIP files, file problems, and so on. After some digging, I found a techy workaround.

  1. Find an interesting deck using Anki’s shared deck list.
  2. Load http://anki.ichi2.net/file/search in your browser.
  3. Search for the name of the deck you wanted. Note the number immediately after its opening [. For example, ‘Latin 101’ is 33.
  4. Open a command line (e.g. Terminal for Mac users).
  5. Type curl http://anki.ichi2.net/file/get?id=NUMBER > deck.zip (again, ‘Latin 101’ would be 33).
  6. Open the resultant zip.
  7. shared.anki is your deck, and can be renamed if desired. No other files are needed.

written 12 September, 02009 • Comments ⁋