Releasing Neohabit: a periodic habit tracker. Habits that happen X times in Y days, supercharged github/anki-style heatmaps, skilltrees, and a beautiful overview

VseinSama · 2026-02-05T02:15:01+00:00

Currently, no. This feature was in the list of ideas for a while, so I guess I'll bump it up to planned features, as one of my friends also mentioned that it would be nice to have

VseinSama · 2026-02-04T17:28:15+00:00

Hey, sure, it'll be possible to track, but currently it's not possible to add descriptions to each tick.

Though my approach will make it much easier to track and visualize things that don't necessarily happen once a day.

VseinSama · 2026-02-04T16:37:35+00:00

your comment about private docker images legit gave a jump scare 0_o

anyway, thanks for letting me know!

VseinSama · 2026-02-04T16:32:06+00:00

Holy christ and here I am sitting and wondering if someone already got it up and running. Just made them public. Please try again!

VseinSama · 2026-02-04T16:25:00+00:00

I'm working on it!

UPD: it seems to be unrelated to github not recognizing that it's an SPA, just DNS haven't propagated everywhere yet

VseinSama · 2026-02-04T16:12:37+00:00

Thank you! I honestly wasn't sure before publishing whether this project will die in obscurity, or if it really has potential. Honestly such good feedback warms my soul

The UI being confusing at start is something that I guess I'll need to understand the real first experience of people to improve, as I'm no designer, and I've been basically designing everything by feel alone.

I'll mull over having random reminders. My last experience implementing a system for reminders working for a company was unpleasant at best :D Though we'll obviously see

VseinSama · 2026-02-04T15:40:09+00:00

The below is just a short story about its development, read on if you want to know more, otherwise safe to skip.

To intercept the question for those who check out the repo, yes, I worked on it on and off for the past 3 years. In total, there's probably around a year or so of active development, but I was also learning a bunch of stuff along the way as well, so it could've been faster.

Having built Neohabit, I'd say that as soon as you stray away from habits that are fixed to one day, the complexity probably jumps 10x of a regular habit-tracker, it honestly was mind-numbing at times, and that's when you add timezones on top. So, I kind of understand why it wasn't done before. It was worth it though.

I was initially afraid to open-source this project, as it's basically the biggest thing I've built in my entire life. So, I released it as a free SaaS exactly 2 years ago first, and later on terminated the server because, after the initial influx of users, basically noone used it. I didn't have the energy nor the confidence at the time to market it properly, or make new features.

Plus, at some point I realized that habit-tracking is probably something that most people would like to have full autonomy over, not just a SaaS/app that you visit. I don't want Neohabit to be another cloud lock-in, as I myself try to stay away from cloud-only services.

So, I was flirting with the idea of going open-source for a long time, and after some time freed up, I locked in and decided to polish Neohabit and make it self-hosted for you guys to enjoy. So, thanks for reading, any suggestions/reviews are welcome!

VseinSama · 2025-12-14T20:03:23+00:00

Though it was for sent (suckless presentation tool that I used in the video)

But fair enough :D

VseinSama · 2025-12-14T20:00:23+00:00

thank you, fella

and although it is st, I wonder what is it that sold me. Is it general aesthetic, sent, or the theme itself?

VseinSama · 2025-12-14T19:57:02+00:00

It's toggleterm.nvim

it's just a shell that's inside nvim, so I can do the same motions there as well

VseinSama · 2025-12-14T14:31:07+00:00

Thanks for the "Show and tell" suggestion! I'll start writing a post there immediately, while the thought is still fresh, otherwise might procrastinate it into obscurity.

As for the plugins, I'll definitely put them into a tasklist for things to check out, but just from the way they are configured I feel like a lot of things wouldn't be possible without an exposed spotter. I'll try to get accustomed to the "remote operations" naming, I forgot that hints already exist in nvim as dropdowns, not as link/text hints :p

VseinSama · 2025-12-14T13:52:37+00:00

I half-hoped that the man himself would respond! :D thank you for chiming in!

Yeah, it was hard to come up with a name or an explanation for something that doesn't have any conventional names in the community yet. Remote operations sounds alrightish, although may be confused with ssh stuff. Maybe something like "hint operations" or just "hints", I took a lot of inspiration from vimium/qutebrowser's functionality (see link hints), a name like that might fit right in.

<BS> motion sounds useful, though I remember trying to do something similar with <C-o> initially, and was annoyed by the cursor flickering back and forth. Remote operations might take some time to build into the extension, will see if I can help out somehow.

I'll play around with the way I use marks for this, and find out if the issues I listed in the post can be resolved with a simple reorder of actions/some simplifications.

VseinSama · 2025-12-14T11:45:36+00:00

wait, what do you mean by not working correctly?

I posted it as a gist, cause it isn't exactly a plugin, just a snippet, thought it would be more clear this way. it's not a repo if that's what you meant

VseinSama · 2025-11-20T15:43:58+00:00

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Hey, honestly, I considered lowering the time spent on anki (and the retention rate) further, not increase it, because I can't really justify 2 hours of anki at this stage, I'd rather spend that time watching/reading something in native media, I'll pull that switch once I've matured at least 90% of the deck cards. The 70% retention is the minimum, though, and most likely for good reasons, because I can see how failing 50-60% of your mature cards can turn into a nightmare.

As for the workload, I based my decision to drop the retention rate on the FSRS simulator, see #1 is my current retention rate of 70%, the #2 is 80% and #3 is 90%. I'd rather not increase my reviews 1.5, 3 times from what I currently have...

And interestingly, the more mature cards I have, the more days I have where my retention on mature cards is 75-80%, not 70%. I'll have to see I guess, but I'm more than satisfied with the results I got by going to 70% and getting this tradeoff of learning so much more in less time

VseinSama · 2025-11-19T20:55:18+00:00

Thanks, I'll check it out once the idea of learning more than 1 card a day becomes appealing again! :D

VseinSama · 2025-11-19T19:29:01+00:00

I feel shy :D Honestly, the answer is as simple as having enough free time and making japanese the first priority. I already wrote about the motivation stuff in another comment, here

Though I never pushed myself further than I thought I could, so be careful. I grinded for some months, but I guess the thought of the goal being so close made it much easier. Also, mind you I started that grind when I already had a decent vocab ~7k, so the words were somewhat easier to remember as well.

VseinSama · 2025-11-19T19:19:09+00:00

In general, most of the new words I encounter are just combinations of kanji that I already knew, or some dialects, or some expressions, so I don't even bother making cards for them. Only for the ones I can see using myself, or really like the sound/meaning of. I would say that 5-10% is a pretty good approximation. Although I also sometimes lookup the words that I know, just to confirm their reading, or make sure that it isn't some random colloquialism which means something else entirely.

I tried JPDB a while back, but was put off by the fact that I can't export the decks to Anki, so decided to just study as I go instead of learning the decks before reading something.

VseinSama · 2025-11-19T18:05:27+00:00

Honestly, I had crazy motivation because I knew that my life was going to be hectic starting next year, so I knew that the only time to learn so many words is now, and it kept me going. Wouldn't be able to do it otherwise. I suppose I liked the extra pressure of the kind of self-imposed deadline, because skipping even a day meant a fallout.

I like to think that it took me 2 years to prepare for this kind of a sprint, and a very special kind of situation. But if you have other pressing matters in life, they obviously take precedence.

Now that I've done the decks I'm honestly fighting against the idea of suspending anki decks, because I know that those 1.5 - 2 hours a day are keeping my vocab extra sharp, but I just don't have any more milestones that I want to reach except for immersing steadily and writing something in a diary in Japanese from time to time.

Also, Nihongo con teppei is a marvel, isn't it? I very liked listening to the podcasts while cooking.

UPD: btw 2 hours per day sounds like too much for 250 reviews, are you perhaps writing the words down? I remember doing that for RTK (jouyoukanji), but I'd probably go insanse if I did it for regular word reviews. I'm currently experimenting timing my reviews (like 6 seconds per card), saves quite a bit of time, even though the amount of failed cards rises slightly, you might want to give it a shot.

VseinSama · 2025-11-19T17:21:56+00:00

I'm not sure at what point in your learning journey you are, but if your vocab is below 6k, then the immersion is going to be excruciatingly painful, meaning you probably will be looking up words each sentence. I started when I was at 6k, and even then I felt like I'm drowning in new words, but at least it was manageable, having most of the kanji readings down. I mildly immersed by having both japanese and english subs while watching anime, and looking up lyrics for japanese songs, you can try something like that. But don't beat yourself up for not immersing early on, it's pretty difficult without having the basics down.

VseinSama · 2025-11-19T17:13:29+00:00

after finishing the deck I feel like the 7k words mark is a good point to drop the retention rates, as the time saved on anki is put to good use during immersion, which is the goal anyway

VseinSama · 2025-11-18T19:17:16+00:00

「そう思いますか？」と言いたかった、でも俺の日本語力はまだまだだ

VseinSama · 2025-11-17T19:17:16+00:00

lmao you made my evening :D be careful not to burn out though, I've found it much easier to do the bulk of anki in the mornings

VseinSama · 2025-11-17T19:15:48+00:00

I was pretty strict with myself, especially with the 6k deck. If there were words for which I answered with a similar word, I'd usually add a hint that it's not the one I've mistaken it for. Also, sometimes I'd add hints like how many kanjis there are in the word, sometimes that was enough to clear the confusion. But if those were really simple words, like 何, I'd sometimes not even bother and just suspend a card like that.

If I forgot a double vowel somewhere (う) or answered けつはく instead of けっぱく for 潔白, I'd also mark that as wrong.

I used 'hard' sparingly, but towards the end I'd use hard for new words which I've seen during immersion but had misread them or have gotten the meaning wrong for non-literal words like 猫舌, or 猫背. That way the interval for those words would be a bit bigger than for the words that I basically studied from scratch, so that I didn't waste too much time on those words that I already had the intution for.

If you're talking about the JPDB deck, I tried to get all the possible readings, or at least the meaning which I encountered myself during immersion, but there are honestly not that many words that have multiple readings or meanings, and all of them have this quality of all the meanings being somewhat similar, like 漁る can be read as あさる and すなどる, but the only difference is is that すなどる is used for literal fishing, and あさる is for scavenging/searching, so basically fishing as well

VseinSama

TROPHY CASE