lathrys-at/shrike

Shrike

Sometimes you want to work on your Anki collection without opening Anki. That's what Shrike is for. It's a command-line client and an MCP server for your collection, so you can manage cards from a terminal or hand them to an LLM agent.

Shrike works directly on the collection's SQLite database, without using the Anki desktop app or relying on the AnkiConnect bridge. You get:

• a shrike CLI to browse, create, edit, and delete notes and note types
• an MCP server exposing the same operations to agents
• semantic search over your notes, with embeddings computed locally

Requirements

• Python 3.12 or newer
• An Anki collection (a collection.anki2 file)

Getting started

Install Shrike from PyPI:

pipx install shrike-mcp   # or: pip install shrike-mcp

The package is shrike-mcp; the command it installs is shrike.

Point Shrike at your collection and start the daemon:

shrike server start --collection ~/path/to/collection.anki2

That starts a background daemon with your collection open. The other shrike commands talk to it, so they don't repeat --collection:

shrike info
shrike note list --deck Default

And when you're done:

shrike server stop

Semantic search

shrike note search finds notes by meaning instead of keywords. You supply an embedding model to turn your notes into vectors, and pick a backend to run it. Shrike has two backends, and which one suits you depends mostly on whether your cards are plain text.

Choosing a backend

For plain-text cards, which is the common case, the ONNX backend is the simpler choice.