An Anki alternative built around capture

Anki is deep, configurable, and beloved for good reason — if you enjoy tuning intervals and grooming a deck, nothing here is trying to talk you out of it. Capecho is for the other learner: the one who believes in spaced review but stalls at the manual card-building, and whose decks fill with bare word-and-definition entries because making richer ones by hand is too much work to sustain.

If that is you, the realistic outcome with a build-it-yourself flashcard tool is a backlog of words you meant to add and a deck thinner than your reading deserves. Capecho is shaped around removing that exact friction, so the cards get made because making them costs almost nothing.

Choosing a different home for review should not mean giving up the science. Capecho schedules with FSRS — the same spaced-repetition algorithm Anki offers — so you keep the retention benefit of well-timed reviews. What changes is the labor in front of it: the cards are not yours to build, because capture builds them for you.

That is the whole trade. You are not swapping a strong algorithm for a weaker one; you are swapping a manual card-building chore for a one-keystroke capture, and letting the proven scheduler do what it already does well.

On your Mac, a single shortcut captures the word and the exact sentence you met it in, using macOS's built-in on-device text recognition — the engine behind Live Text — and only at the instant you press it. The system returns only the recognized text — the screen image never reaches Capecho — nothing is uploaded, and nothing runs in the background; a copy-and-paste mode covers anywhere you would rather not use screen recognition.

Each capture opens a preview you can edit before saving, so you fix a misread character or trim the sentence on the spot. The card that results is fronted by your own sentence rather than a generic prompt — context-rich by default, with no fields to fill.

Where a from-scratch flashcard app gives you an empty card, Capecho fills it. Every saved word carries a free, unmetered explanation — senses, part of speech, pronunciation, and a system-dictionary handoff — and review tests the word inside your sentence, so recall transfers back to real reading instead of to a single memorized pairing.

When a sentence is genuinely tricky, an in-context explanation can unpack the precise sense the word carries there. It is metered — ten a day, free, unlimited on Pro — and the cap never blocks capture, the core explanation, review, or export. Built first for English and never English-only, Capecho lets the target language ride along with each word.

Picking Capecho is not a wall around your words. Export to Anki and CSV anytime, with a target-language column so a Spanish deck and a German deck stay separate on import, and keep reviewing in Anki if that is your home. Capecho is a complement, not a replacement — you can run both and let it carry only the capture.

And it is honest about where it is today. The core loop — capture, context, the word explanation, and review on the Mac — is free, with no subscription on the core loop; Pro is the optional paid upgrade for unlimited saved words and unlimited in-context. The macOS app is the shipped surface now, and a phone review companion is coming, so the words you capture today will be ready and waiting the day review moves to your pocket.