Browsing

• Table Modes
• Sidebar
  • Search Tool
  • Selection Tool
  • Saved Searches
  • Editing Items
  • Finding Items
• Search Box
• Card/Note Table
  • Rows
  • Columns
• Editing Area
• Menus and Actions
  • Edit
  • Notes
  • Cards
  • Go
• Find and Replace
• Finding Duplicates

The Browse window allows you to search through your cards and notes, and edit them. It is opened by clicking Browse in the main window, or by pressing B. It is comprised of three sections: the sidebar on the left, the card/note table on the top right, and the editing area on the bottom right. By positioning the mouse between two sections, it is possible to click and drag to expand one section and shrink the other.

Table Modes

Anki 2.1.45+ offers two modes: either cards or notes are shown in the data table. You can change the current mode by clicking the switch at the top, to the left of the search area, or pressing Ctrl+Alt+T or Cmd+Opt+T. The switch also indicates if Cards or Notes are currently shown.

Note: For the sake of simplicity, this manual generally assumes the Cards mode to be the active one. Whenever selecting/finding/etc. "cards" is mentioned, the reader may substitute it for "cards or notes depending on the active mode".

Sidebar

The sidebar on the left allows quick access to common search terms. On Anki 2.1.45+, it also provides a searchbar, facilities to edit tags and decks, and a choice of two different tools, which are discussed in the following sections. You can switch tools using the toolbar at the top of the sidebar or the shortcuts Alt+1/2.

Search Tool

With this tool, the sidebar behaves as in previous versions: Clicking on an item will search for it.

You can hold down Ctrl (Command on Mac) while clicking in order to append the clicked item to the current search with an AND condition, instead of starting a new search. If you wanted to show learning cards that were also in the German deck for instance, you could click on "Learning", then Ctrl-click on "German".

You can hold down Shift to create an OR search instead of an AND. For example, you could click one deck, then Shift-click another to show cards from either of the decks in the same view.

You can hold down Alt (Option on Mac) in order to reverse the search (prepend a -): for example, to show all cards in a current deck that do not have a certain tag. Alt/Option can be combined with either Ctrl or Shift (e.g. clicking with Ctrl+Alt will result in adding a new search term that is negated).

On Anki 2.1.39+, you can also hold down both Ctrl and Shift together when clicking a search term to replace all occurrences of the same kind of search with the new one. Let's say you had previously typed in a complicated search expression like deck:Swahili (is:due or tag:important) and now want to perform the same search for your Urdu deck. You can hold down Ctrl+Shift while clicking the Urdu deck in the sidebar to obtain the following search expression: deck:Urdu (is:due or tag:important).

Selection Tool

The Selection tool allows for selecting multiple items at the same time by holding down Ctrl or Shift while clicking. It also enables drag-and-drop to reorder decks and tags.

Here is an example: Say you have the tags Math, Calculus, and Algebra. Click on the Calculus tag, then Ctrl-click on the Algebra tag. Now both tags are selected, click and drag any of the two onto the Math tag to make them both children of this tag. Behind the scene, Anki has renamed the two tags to Math::Calculus and Math::Algebra respectively and updated your notes accordingly.

Another use case for selecting multiple items is searching: If you right-click on a selection of items, you can choose Search > All/Any Selected. This can be combined with keyboard modifiers as described in Search Tool to append the resulting search to the current search.

Saved Searches

If you regularly search for the same thing, you can save the current search by right-clicking the topmost item in the sidebar, choosing “Save Current Search” and typing in a name. You can also drag and drop any sidebar item onto this area to add an equivalent saved search, effectively pinning it at the top.

Editing Items

You can delete or rename tags, decks, and saved searches directly from the sidebar, from the right-click menu, or by using a shortcut key (Del and F2 on Windows). Deletion even works for multiple items at once (see Selection Tool).

Finding Items

To find a certain item in the sidebar tree, type part of its name into the searchbar at the top.

Search Box

Above the card list is a search box. You can type in various things there to search for cards. For information on the search syntax, see Searching.

Card/Note Table

The table's rows represent cards or notes that match the current search. When you click on a row, the corresponding note will be shown in the bottom section.

Rows

If you drag the mouse or hold Ctrl or Command to select multiple rows, the editor will be temporarily hidden. Various operations (such as changing the deck) can operate on multiple cards or notes at once, independent of the active mode. Therefore in Cards mode, a note is considered to be selected if any of its cards is selected, and in Notes mode, a card is considered to be selected if its note is selected.

Other operations (like showing card information) only operate on a single card or note. This is called the current card or note, which is usually the one that was last selected or clicked. In Cards Mode, again, the current note is the note of the current card and in Notes mode, the current card is the first card of the current note.

The background colour will change depending on the card and note. In Cards mode, the first match will be used:

1. if the card is flagged, use the flag colour,
2. if the card is suspended, yellow,
3. if the card's note is marked, purple.

In Notes mode, colour is only applied to marked notes.
For more information about marked notes and suspended cards, see Editing and More.

Columns

The columns are configurable: right click on one (or Ctrl-click on a Mac) to choose which columns you'd like to see. You can drag columns to reorder them. Clicking on a column will sort by that column; click again to reverse the sort order. Note that you cannot sort by the Question and Answer columns.

All columns are available for both Cards and Notes mode but sometimes with slightly different names and data. The following table lists the behaviours for both modes.

Editing Area

The bottom right area displays the note of the currently selected row. For more information about cards and notes, see Getting Started. For more information on formatting buttons, see Editing.

You can see a preview of what the currently selected card would look like when reviewing by clicking the Preview button at the top of the editing area. Note that this will not display any type-the-answer fields on your cards, which makes it easier to preview the cards quickly. In Notes mode, the preview is shown for the first card of the selected note.

Menus and Actions

At the top of the browser window, you find a toolbar with various menus which in turn offer various actions that can be performed in the browser.

Edit

Notes

Most of the following actions operate on the selected notes. They are also available through a context menu when a selected row is right-clicked in Notes mode. In Cards mode, they can be found in a submenu of the context menu.

Cards

The following actions operate on the currently selected cards. They are also available through a context menu when a selected row is rightclicked in Cards mode. In Notes mode, they can be found in a submenu of the context menu.

Go

This menu exists to provide keyboard shortcuts to jump to various parts of the browser, and to go up and down the card list.

Find and Replace

This dialog allows for replacing text on notes. As described above, it is available from the toolbar and the table's context menu.

The first input field is for the text that is going to be replaced, the second one for the replacement. Next, there is a dropdown menu that allows you to specify where Anki should look for text to replace: in a note's tags (requires Anki 2.1.45+), in all fields, or just in a specific field (only fields belonging to a selected note will be listed).

By default, only selected notes will be affected. If you want to lift that restriction, you can untick the "selected notes only" checkbox (requires Anki 2.1.45+).

The regular expression option allows you to perform complex replacements. For example, assume there is the following text in a field:

<img src="pic.jpg" />

We use these settings:

(Note that on Anki versions prior to 2.1.28, you would need to replace ${1} with \1.)

Then the assumed field content will change to:

pic.jpg

A full discussion on regular expressions is outside the scope of this document. There are a number of syntax guides available on the web:

• For Anki 2.1.28+, see https://docs.rs/regex/latest/regex/index.html#syntax.
• For older Anki versions, see http://docs.python.org/library/re.html.

Finding Duplicates

You can use the Notes > Find Duplicates option to search for notes that have the same content. When you open the window, Anki will look at all of your note types and present a list of all possible fields. If you want to look for duplicates in the Back field, you’d select it from the list and then click Search.

By default, it will search in all note types that have the field you provided. This differs from the duplicate check when you add cards manually, which is limited to a single note type.

The Optional filter text box allows you to narrow down where Anki will look for duplicates. If you only want to search for duplicates in the "French Vocab" and "French Verbs" note types, you would enter:

"note:french vocab" or "note:french verbs"

Or you might want to look only for duplicates in a particular deck, so you could use:

"deck:myDeck"

The search syntax is the same as used when searching in the browser. For more information, see Searching.

You can click one of the links in the search results list to display the duplicate notes in that set. If the search brings up a large number of duplicates, you may wish to instead click the Tag Duplicates button, which will tag all matching notes with duplicate. You can then search for this tag in the browser and handle them all from the same screen.