A Cloze note type's front and back templates should have a cloze filter. If one is missing, you will need to add it back so that Anki can create cloze cards correctly.

Single empty cards

When making clozes, each cloze number is turned into a separate card. For example, the following will create three cards:

{{c1::This}} is a {{c2::sample}} {{c3::sentence}}.

If you you later edit the text, and either remove or change a cloze number, the previously created card may become blank. For example:

{{c1::This}} is a {{c2::sample}}

and

{{c1::This}} is a {{c2::sample}} {{c1::sentence}}.

are both changes that would make card 3 blank. When you view card 3, you'll see a message indicating that the card is blank, and can be cleaned up with the Empty Cards function. You can access that function via the Tools menu of the computer version's main window, and use it to remove blank cards. Please check the reported empty cards first, and if in doubt, create a backup with the File>Export menu item before proceeding.

All cloze cards empty

If you accidentally modify your card template, it may prevent any cloze deletions from appearing. If that has happened, please edit one such problem card, and note down the name of the first field - it is usually called "Text". Then, please:

• Click on the Cards... button

• Replace the front text with

  {{cloze:Text}}
  

• Replace the back text with the same.

If your field was called something other than Text, replace Text with the name of the field.

Preferences

• Appearance
  • General
  • User Interface
  • Distractions
• Review
  • Scheduler
  • Review
• Editing
  • Editing
  • Browsing
  • Import/Export
• Syncing
  • Synchronisation
  • AnkiWeb Account
  • Self-hosted Sync Server
• Backups

The preferences are available from the Tools menu on Windows/Linux, or the Anki menu on a Mac.

Appearance

General

Language
Change your display language. You can help to improve translations here

User Interface

Theme
Dark (night) mode will make Anki's interface dark, and will cause cards to be shown as white text on a black background. Some card templates may need to be modified to work properly with this option enabled - please see night mode styling for more information.

From 2.1.50+ there is an option to switch to day or night mode automatically.

User interface size
If you find that the interface elements are too small for you, you can try to increase this setting.

Reset Windows Sizes
This will reset all windows sizes and locations to the default settings.

Video driver
Anki's libraries need a video driver to draw content on the screen. Due to different hardware and software configurations, the driver that works best on your machine may vary. ANGLE and OpenGL will perform better than the software option, but they may not function correctly on some systems. On Macs, you will almost always want to use the OpenGL option.

Note: If you're using 2.1.50+ (Qt6), please, check this page.

Distractions

These options allow you to remove some unnecessary elements from the screen during reviews. You can:

• Hide the top and bottom bar during reviews.
• Enable the "minimalist" mode, making the interface more compact/less fancy.
• Reduce motion, to disable some transitions/animations.
• Switching between native styling and the Anki theme (only on Mac/Linux).

Review

Scheduler

Next day starts at
Controls when Anki should start showing the next day’s cards. The default setting of 4AM ensures that if you’re studying around midnight, you won’t have two days' worth of cards shown to you in one session. If you stay up very late or wake up very early, you may want to adjust this to a time you’re usually sleeping. Note that the start of the next day is relative to your current timezone. Also note that any cards that cross a day boundary will appear at the start of the day they are scheduled for, just like review cards do.

Learn ahead limit
Tells Anki how to behave when there is nothing left to study in the current deck but cards in learning. The default setting of 20 minutes tells Anki that cards should be shown early if they have a delay of less than 20 minutes and there’s nothing else to do. If you set this to 0, Anki will always wait the full delay, showing the congratulations screen until the remaining cards are ready to be reviewed.

Timebox time limit
Timeboxing is a technique to help you focus by dividing a longer activity (such as a 30 minute study session) into smaller blocks. If you set the timebox time limit to a non-zero number of minutes, Anki will periodically show you how many cards you’ve managed to study during the prescribed time limit.

Review

Show play buttons on cards with audio
Whether a clickable (re)play button will be shown in the review screen for cards with audio.

Interrupt current audio when answering
Whether a currently playing audio file should be stopped when answering a card.

Show remaining card count
Disable this option to hide the card count at the bottom of the screen.

Show next review time above answer buttons
Useful to know how far in the future your cards are being pushed.

Spacebar (or enter) also answers card
Defines whether a press on the space bar (or the enter key) also answers cards.

Editing

Editing

Paste clipboard images as PNG
By default Anki pastes images on the clipboard as JPG files, to save disk space. You can use the option to paste as PNG images instead. PNG images support transparent backgrounds and are lossless, but they usually result in much larger file sizes.

Paste without Shift strips formatting
By default, formatting like bold and colors are kept when pasting, unless the Shift key is held down. This option reverses the behaviour.

Default deck
Controls how note types and decks interact. The default of "When adding, default to current deck" means that Anki saves the last-used note type for each deck and selects it again then next time you choose the deck (and, in addition, will start with the current deck selected when choosing Add from anywhere). The other option, "Change deck depending on note type," saves the last-used deck for each note type (and opens the add window to the last-used note type when you choose Add). This may be more convenient if you always use a single note type for each deck.

The last used deck/note type is updated when you add a card. If you change the deck and close the add window without adding a card, it won't be saved.

Browsing

Default search text
Allows you to customize the starting search text in the browser (eg, to start with "deck:current").

Ignore accents in search (slower)
When enabled, simple text searches automatically ignore accents.

Import/Export

Legacy import/export handling
If enabled, legacy (pre 2.1.55) import / export code will be used. It is recommended to deactivate this option.

Syncing

This tab contains options related to syncing with AnkiWeb.

Synchronisation

Synchronize audio and images too
When enabled, media will also be synced with AnkiWeb.

Automatically sync on profile open/close
Disable this if you don't want an automatic sync with AnkiWeb when opening / closing a profile.

Periodically sync media

On next sync, force changes on one direction
When this option is enabled, the next sync will ask you whether you wish to upload or download. This is useful if you have made some changes accidentally, and wish to overwrite them with an older version that is on AnkiWeb.

AnkiWeb Account

When logged in, clicking on Log Out will log you out.

Self-hosted Sync Server

For info on the custom sync server option, see this section.

Backups

Please see this section of the manual.

Deck Options

• Presets
• Subdecks
• Daily Limits
  • New Cards/Day
  • Maximum Reviews/Day
  • Per-Deck Daily Limits
  • New Cards Ignore Review Limit
  • Limits Start From The Top
• New Cards
  • Learning Steps
    • Day Boundaries
  • Graduating Interval
  • Easy Interval
  • Insertion Order
• Lapses
  • Relearning Steps
  • Minimum Interval
  • Leeches
• Display Order
  • New Card Gather Order
  • New Card Sort Order
  • New/Review Order
  • Interday Learning/Review Order
  • Review Sort Order
• Burying
• Audio
• Timer
• Auto Advance
• FSRS
  • A Short Guide
  • Desired Retention
  • FSRS Parameters
  • Reschedule Cards on Change
  • Compute Minimum Recommended Retention
    • Learning and Relearning Steps
    • Add-On Compatibility
    • More
• Advanced
  • Maximum Interval
  • Historical Retention
  • Ignore Cards Reviews Before
  • Starting Ease
  • Easy Bonus
  • Interval Modifier
  • Hard Interval
  • New Interval
  • Custom Scheduling

Deck options primarily control the way Anki schedules cards. It is recommended that you spend a few weeks with the defaults to get a feel for how Anki works before you start adjusting the options. Please make sure you understand the options before changing them, as mistakes can reduce Anki's effectiveness.

On your computer, do any of the following to open deck options:

• Click the gear icon on the Decks screen.
• Select a deck on the Decks screen, and then click Options at the bottom of the screen.
• Click More > Options while in review mode.
• Press O while in review mode.

Here are some community posts about deck options that have been contributed in the past:

• Deck Options Explained
• Deck Options in a Mental Map

Presets

Anki allows you to share options between different decks, to make it easier to update options in many decks at once. To do this, options are grouped into presets. If you change an option in a preset, the change is applied to all decks that use the same preset. All newly created decks use the "Default" preset.

To change the options in one deck but not other decks, click the arrow icon in the top right of the Deck Options window. You can do the following:

• Save: Save all modifications you've made in deck options.
• Add Preset: Add a new preset for this deck, with the default options.
• Clone: Clone your current preset, which is useful if you want to modify some of the options but keep the rest as they are.
• Rename: Change the name of the current preset.
• Delete: Delete the current preset. This will make your next sync a one-way sync.
• Save to All Subdecks: Like Save, but also assigns the selected preset to all subdecks of the currently selected deck.
• Optimize All Presets: When FSRS is enabled, this allows you to optimize the parameters of all presets at once.

Deck options are not retroactive. For example, if you change an option that controls the delay after failing a card, cards that you failed before changing this option will still have the old delay, not the new one.

Subdecks

If your deck has subdecks, and you wish one or more subdecks to have different settings to the parent decks, you can assign those subdecks to different presets. When Anki shows a card, it will check which subdeck the card is in, and use the options for that deck. There are two exceptions:

• The New cards/day and Maximum reviews/day limits of a subdeck affect the number of cards that can be gathered from that subdeck. But the total number of cards you see during your study session is controlled by the limits of the deck you select to study.
• The display order options are taken from the deck you select to study, not the deck of the current card.

For example, let's say you have this collection:

- Deck A (Preset 1)
  - Deck A::Subdeck B (Preset 2)

Preset 1 and Preset 2 are identical, with two exceptions:

• Preset 1:
  • Learning steps: 1m 10m
  • New/review order: Mix with reviews
• Preset 2:
  • Learning steps: 20m 2h
  • New/review order: Show after reviews

If you choose to study Subdeck B:

• Learning steps for all new cards will be 20m 2h (Preset 2 applies).
• All new cards will be shown after reviews (Preset 2 applies).

If you choose to study Deck A:

• Learning steps for new cards in Deck A will be 1m 10m (Preset 1 applies).
• Learning steps for new cards in Subdeck B will be 20m 2h (Preset 2 applies).
• All new cards will be mixed with reviews (Preset 1 applies).

Daily Limits

New Cards/Day

This option controls how many new cards can be introduced each day you open the program. If you study fewer than the limit, or miss a day, the next day the counts will be back to their original setting: you won't be given more cards than your limit allows.

When studying a deck that has subdecks inside it, the limits set on each subdeck control the maximum number of cards drawn from that particular deck. The selected deck's limits control the total number of cards that will be shown.

For earlier versions, see this FAQ page.

Studying new cards will temporarily increase the number of reviews you need to do a day, as newly-learnt material needs to be repeated a number of times before the delay between repetitions can increase appreciably. If you are consistently learning 20 new cards a day, you can expect your daily reviews to be roughly about 200 cards/day. You can decrease the reviews required by introducing fewer new cards each day until your review burden decreases. More than one Anki user has excitedly studied hundreds of new cards over their first few days of using the program, and then has become overwhelmed by the reviews required.

Maximum Reviews/Day

Allows you to set an upper limit on the number of review cards to show each day. When this limit is reached, Anki will not show any more review cards for the day, even if there are more waiting. If you study consistently, this setting can help to smooth out occasional peaks in due card counts, and can save you from a heart attack when returning to Anki after taking a week off. When reviews have been hidden due to this option, a message will appear in the congratulations screen, suggesting you consider increasing the limit if you have time.

When studying a deck that has subdecks inside it, the review limit behaves similarly to the new card limit.

Anki includes any learning cards that have crossed the day boundary (interday learning cards) in the review count, so those learning cards will be subject to the review limit.

Per-Deck Daily Limits

It is possible to use the same preset for different decks, with customized limits for each of them. This eliminates the need to create cloned presets just for that purpose, and makes it easier to set custom limits on subdecks.

Anki provides three options for daily limits:

• Preset: applies to all the decks using a preset.
• This deck: specific to a particular deck.
• Today only: specific to a particular deck, and temporary.

New Cards Ignore Review Limit

By default, the review limit also applies to new cards, and no new cards will be shown when the review limit has been reached. If this option is enabled, new cards will be shown regardless of the review limit.

If you have a backlog of overdue review cards, it is recommended that you stop introducing new cards until you catch up with that backlog. Continuing to introduce new cards when you're already behind can make the backlog worse.

Limits Start From The Top

By default, the daily limits of a higher-level deck do not apply if you select one of its subdecks. A parent deck can have a new card limit of 10 cards/day and its subdecks can have a new card limit of 20 cards/day. The limits set on parent deck do not affect the number of new cards you can study from its subdeck.

When this option is enabled, the limits set on higher-level decks also apply to their subdecks when a subdeck is selected. In the previous example, you will be able to study only 10 new cards from the subdecks instead of 20 new cards.

This option can be useful if you wish to study individual subdecks, while enforcing a total limit on cards all the subdecks.

New Cards

The options here only affect new cards and learning cards. Once a card has graduated (that is, gone through all the learning steps), the options in this section no longer apply to the card.

Learning Steps

Controls the number of learning repetitions, and the delay between them. One or more delays, separated by spaces must be entered. Each time you click Good during review, the card moves to the next step. Each time you click Again, the card goes back to the first step.

For example, let's say that your learning steps are 1m 10m 1d.

• When you click Again, the card goes through the first step, and is shown again 1 minute later.
• When you click Good on a new card or after the 1 minute step, it moves to the next step, and is shown again in 10 minutes.
• When you click Good on a card after the 10 minute step, it is delayed until the next day.
• When you click Good on the card the next day, it graduates and becomes a review card. The card is shown again after the delay configured by the graduating interval.

The Hard button works differently depending on which step you're on.

• When you're on the first step, the Hard button shows a delay of 6m. The 6m delay is the average of first two steps: 2m 10m.
  • Exception: When there's only one learning step, Hard button shows a delay 1.5 times that step. This delay is at most 1 day longer than the learning step.
• When you're on any other step, the Hard button repeats that step.

If there’s nothing else to study, Anki will show learning cards up to 20 minutes early by default. To turn this off or change the amount of time to look ahead, see Preferences.

Day Boundaries

Anki treats small steps and steps that cross a day boundary differently. With small steps, the cards are shown as soon as the delay has passed, in preference to review cards and new cards. This is done so that you can answer the card as closely to your requested delay as possible. In contrast, if the step crosses a day boundary, the delay is automatically converted to days. For example, if next day starts after 5 hours and the delay is 6 hours, Anki converts the delay to 1 day.

Graduating Interval

The number of days to wait before showing a card again, after the Good button is used on the final learning step. This means that it is the first interval after the learning card graduates. Please see the example from earlier in this section.

Easy Interval

The number of days to wait before showing a card again, after the Easy button is used on it.

The Easy button turns learning cards into a review cards regardless of which step you're on, and assigns them the delay you have configured in this option. Easy interval should always be at least as long as the graduating interval, and typically a few days longer.

Insertion Order

Controls whether Anki should add new cards into the deck randomly, or sequentially. When you change this option, Anki will re-sort the decks in the current preset.

On recent Anki versions, you should leave this option set to Sequential, and adjust the display order instead.

Lapses

When you click Again on a review card, it is called a lapse. The options listed here affect such lapsed cards.

Relearning Steps

The same as learning steps, but for lapsed cards. When you fail a review card (press Again), the card goes through relearning steps, before it becomes a review card again.

If you leave the steps blank, the card will skip relearning, and will be assigned a new interval of 1 day by default.

Minimum Interval

Specifies a minimum number of days a card should wait after it finishes relearning. The default is one day, meaning once relearning is finished, it will be shown again the next day.

Leeches

Control the way Anki handles leeches. For details, see the leeches section.

Display Order

The options in this section are taken from the deck you select to study, not the deck of the currently displayed card.

Some further information about display order is available in the studying section.

New Card Gather Order

Controls how Anki gathers new cards from a deck. The options are:

• Deck: Gathers cards from each subdeck in order, starting from the top. Cards from each subdeck are gathered in ascending position. If the daily limit of the selected deck is reached, gathering may stop before all subdecks have been checked. This order is fastest in large collections, and allows you to prioritize subdecks that are closer to the top.

  Decks/subdecks are always ordered alphabetically, so you can give them a numeric prefix like 001 to control the order they appear in. You can also use _ and ~ as a prefix to place items at the top or bottom.

  Although position order depends initially on the insertion order option, you can manually reposition cards in different ways.

• Deck, then random notes: Gathers cards from each subdeck in order, starting from the top. Cards from each subdeck are gathered from randomly selected notes.

• Ascending position: Gathers cards by ascending position (due #), which is typically the oldest-added first.

• Descending position: Gathers cards by descending position (due #), which is typically the latest-added first.

• Random notes: Gathers cards from randomly selected notes.

• Random cards: Gathers cards in a random order.

New Card Sort Order

Controls how the new cards are sorted after they have been gathered. The options are:

• Card type, then order gathered: Shows cards in order of card type number. Cards of each card type number are shown in the order they were gathered. If you have sibling burying disabled, this ensures all front→back cards are seen before any back→front cards. This order is useful if you don't want sibling cards to appear too close to each other.

• Order gathered: Shows cards exactly as they were gathered. If sibling burying is disabled, this typically results in all sibling cards appearing one after the other.

• Card type, then random: Shows cards in order of card type number, but shuffles the cards of each card type number. This order is useful if you don't want sibling cards to appear too close to each other, but still want the cards to appear in a random order.

• Random note, then card type: Picks notes at random, then shows all of their siblings in order.

• Random: Fully shuffles the gathered cards.

New/Review Order

Whether new cards should be mixed in with review cards, shown before them, or shown after them.

Interday Learning/Review Order

Whether (re)learning cards that cross a day boundary should be mixed in with review cards, shown before them, or shown after them. Because learning cards tend to be harder than review cards, some users prefer to see them at the end (getting the easy stuff done first), or at the start (allowing more time to review forgotten ones).

Review Sort Order

Controls how the review cards are sorted. The options are:

• Due date, then random: The default order prioritizes cards that have been waiting longer, and it's the recommended order when you are up to date, or when you only have a small backlog. If you have taken an extended break or have fallen behind in your reviews, you may want to consider changing the sort order temporarily.

• Due date, then deck: This also prioritizes cards that have been waiting longer, and then shows review cards for each subdeck in turn.

• Deck, then due date: Shows review cards for each subdeck in turn. This order is generally not recommended, as having material appear consistently in the same order makes it easier to guess the answer based on context, and leads to weaker memories.

• Ascending intervals: Shows cards with shorter intervals first.

• Descending intervals: Shows cards with longer intervals first.

• Ascending ease: Shows more difficult cards first.

• Descending ease: Shows less difficult cards first.

• Relative overdueness: Shows cards that you're more likely to have forgotten first. This is generally recommended if you have a large backlog that may take some time to get through, and you want to reduce the chances of forgetting more cards.

  When using the SM-2 algorithm, overdueness is determined by comparing how overdue cards are, and how long their interval is. For example, a card with a current interval of 5 days that is overdue by 2 days, will display before a card with a current interval of 10 days that is overdue by 3 days.

  When using FSRS, overdueness is calculated based on on each card's retrievability, and the desired retention in the deck preset.

Burying

When Anki gathers cards, it first gathers intraday learning cards, then interday learning cards, then review cards, and finally new cards. This affects how burying works:

• If you have all burying options enabled, the sibling that comes earliest in that list will be shown. For example, a review card will be shown in preference to a new card.
• Siblings later in the list can not bury earlier card types. For example, if you disable burying of new cards, and study a new card, it will not bury any interday learning or review cards, and you may see both a review sibling and new sibling in the same session.

The options are:

• Bury new siblings: Whether other new cards of the same note (e.g. reverse cards, adjacent cloze deletions) will be delayed until the next day.
• Bury review siblings: Whether other review cards of the same note will be delayed until the next day.
• Bury interday learning siblings: Whether other learning cards of the same note that crossed a day boundary will be delayed until the next day.

For more info about burying cards, please see this section of the manual.

Audio

• Don't play audio automatically: By default, Anki automatically plays any audio you have on cards. If you turn on this option Anki will not play audio until you press the replay audio key, R or F5.

• Skip question when replaying answer: Controls whether audio from the question side is played when you use replay action on the answer side. Note that, Anki does not automatically play audio from the {{FrontSide}} field. This option does not influence the behaviour of automatic play.

Timer

Anki monitors how long it takes you to answer each card, so that it can show you how long was spent studying each day. The time taken does not influence scheduling.

The options are:

• Maximum answer seconds: The default limit is 60 seconds. If you take longer than that, Anki assumes you have walked away from your computer or have been distracted, and limits the recorded time to 60 seconds, so that you don’t end up with inaccurate statistics. If you consistently take longer than 60 seconds to answer a card (from when question is shown until you press an answer button), you may want to either consider raising this limit, or, ideally, making your cards simpler.
• Show answer timer: In the review screen, show a timer that counts the number of seconds you're taking to review each card.
• Stop timer on answer: whether the timer should keep running when you show the answer.

Auto Advance

Requires Anki 23.12 or later. Auto Advance allows you to automatically take some actions after a certain amount of time has passed. To use it, you must first set a non-zero time in Seconds to show question for and/or Seconds to show answer for. Then, in the review screen, use the Auto Advance action from the More button to start advancing.

FSRS

The Free Spaced Repetition Scheduler (FSRS) is an alternative to Anki's legacy SuperMemo 2 (SM-2) algorithm. By more accurately determining how much information you are likely to forget, it can help you remember more material in the same amount of time.

When you turn on FSRS, some new options become available, and SM-2 specific options, such as Graduating interval, Easy bonus, etc. are hidden. This option is shared by all deck presets.

Before Enabling

• Please ensure all of your Anki clients support FSRS. Anki 23.10, AnkiMobile 23.10, and AnkiWeb all support it. AnkiDroid supports it in 2.17+. If one of your clients doesn't support it, things will not work correctly.
• If you previously used the 'custom scheduling' version of FSRS, please make sure you clear out the custom scheduling section before enabling FSRS.

A Short Guide

• Enable FSRS under the "FSRS" section, at the bottom of the deck options page. FSRS can only be enabled globally; you cannot enable it for some presets and disable it for others.
• Ensure that all your learning and re-learning steps are shorter than 1d and can be completed on the same day. 23h is not recommended even though it's less than one day because you won't be able to finish this step on the same day as your first review. Steps such as 10m or 30m are good.
• Click the "Optimize" button under the "FSRS parameters" field. If you see a message that says "The FSRS parameters currently appear to be optimal", that's fine.
• Choose a value of desired retention: the proportion of cards recalled successfully when they are due. This is the most important setting in FSRS. Higher retention leads to shorter intervals and more reviews per day. The default is 90%, which offers a good balance of retention and workload. Above 90% the workload increases very quickly, and above 97% the workload can be overwhelming. You can use "Compute minimum recommended retention" to help you choose the value of desired retention. Parameters and desired retention are preset-specific, you can make multiple presets with different parameters and desired retention.

FSRS can adapt to almost any habit, except for one: pressing "Hard" instead of "Again" when you forget the information. When you press "Hard", FSRS assumes you have recalled the information correctly (though with hesitation and a lot of mental effort). If you press "Hard" when you have failed to recall the information, all intervals will be unreasonably high. So, if you have this habit, please change it and use "Again" when you forget the information.

Regarding add-on compatibility, as a general rule of thumb, if an add-on affects intervals and scheduling in some way, it shouldn't be used with FSRS.

Desired Retention

Desired retention controls how likely you are to remember cards when they are scheduled for a review. The default value of 0.90 will schedule cards so you have a 90% chance of remembering them when they come up for review again. This should normally translate to remembering around 90% cards when they are reviewed, and only failing around 10%.

Here is a graph that shows how adjusting this value will affect your workload:

The exact shape of the graph is different for everyone. However, there are two patterns that hold true for all:

• As desired retention approaches 1.0, the workload increases drastically. Imagine you have a card with a 90% chance of remembering it after 100 days. If your desired retention is 0.90, you'll review the card again in 100 days. But if your desired retention is 0.95, you'll need to review it after 46 days instead. This means that the intervals of your cards almost halve at 0.95 desired retention and you need to review cards twice as frequently compared to 0.90 desired retention. At 0.97, the interval will be 27 days (you'll have to review your cards 3.7x as frequently). At 0.99, the interval will be only 9 days (you'll have to review your cards more than 10x more frequently than with the defaults).

• As desired retention decreases, you'll forget a greater percentage of your cards, and those cards will need to be reviewed again. Eventually, you'll get to a point where the forgotten cards contribute more to your workload than you gain from the longer delays. Also, keep in mind that forgetting material frequently is demotivating.

For these reasons, we suggest you be conservative when adjusting this number, and recommend you keep it lower than 0.97 and higher than the minimum recommended retention.

FSRS Parameters

FSRS parameters affect how cards are scheduled. Do not change the parameters manually or copy them from someone else.

Optimize FSRS Parameters

The FSRS optimizer uses machine learning to learn your memory patterns and find parameters that best fit your review history. To do this, the optimizer requires several reviews to fine-tune the parameters.

When you click the Optimize button, FSRS will analyze your review history, and generate parameters that are optimal for your memory and the content you're studying. If you have decks that vary wildly in subjective difficulty, it is recommended to assign them separate presets, as the parameters for easier decks will be different from harder decks. There is no need to optimize your parameters frequently: once every few months is sufficient.

By default, parameters are calculated from the review history of all decks using the current preset. You can optionally adjust the search before optimizing the parameters, if you'd like to change which cards are used for optimization.

You can also optimize the parameters for all of your presets at once, by clicking on the down arrow in the top right corner of the deck options window, then choosing Optimize All Presets.

Evaluate FSRS Parameters

You can use the Evaluate button to see metrics that show how well the parameters fit your review history. Smaller numbers indicate a better fit to your review history.

Log loss doesn't have an intuitive interpretation. RMSE (bins) can be interpreted as the average difference between the predicted probability of recalling a card (R) and the actual probability measured from your review history. For example, RMSE=5% means that, on average, FSRS is off by 5% when predicting R. You don't need to understand these metrics to use FSRS.

Note that log loss and RMSE (bins) are not perfectly correlated, so two decks may have similar RMSE values but very different log-loss values, or the other way around.

By default, log loss and RMSE (bins) are calculated from all decks using the current preset. You can optionally adjust the search before evaluating the parameters, if you'd like to change which cards are used for evaluation.

Reschedule Cards on Change

This option controls whether the due dates of cards will be changed when you enable FSRS, change desired retention, or change the parameters. The default is not to reschedule cards: future reviews will use the new scheduling, but there will be no immediate change to your workload. If rescheduling is enabled, the due dates of cards will be changed. Depending on your desired retention, it will often result in a large number of cards becoming due, so this option is not recommended when first switching from SM-2.

Use this option sparingly, as it will add a review entry to each of your cards, and increase the size of your collection.

If you're first switching from SM-2 and still wish to use this option, we recommend you first create a backup, enable FSRS with rescheduling, and then if needed, you can undo or restore from the backup.

Compute Minimum Recommended Retention

Compute minimum recommended retention (CMRR) attempts to find the desired retention value that leads to the most material learnt, in the least amount of time. The calculated number can serve as a reference when deciding what to set your desired retention to. You may wish to choose a higher desired retention, if you’re willing to trade more study time for a greater retention rate. However, setting your desired retention lower than the minimum is not recommended, as you'll spend more time studying than necessary, due to increased forgetting.

Learning and Relearning Steps

(Re)learning steps of 1 day or greater are not recommended when using FSRS. The main reason they were popular with the legacy SM-2 algorithm is because repeatedly failing a card after it has graduated from the learning phase could reduce its ease a lot, leading to what some people called "ease hell". This is not a problem that FSRS suffers from. By keeping your learning steps under a day, you will allow FSRS to schedule cards at times it has calculated are optimal for your material and memory. Another reason not to use longer learning steps is because FSRS may end up scheduling the first review for a shorter time than your last learning step, leading to the Hard button showing a longer time than Good.

We also recommend you keep the number of learning steps to a minimum. Evidence shows that repeating a card multiple times in a single day does not significantly contribute to long-term memory, so your time is better spent on other cards or a shorter study session.

Add-On Compatibility

Some add-ons can cause conflicts with FSRS. As a general rule of thumb, if an add-on affects a card's intervals, it shouldn't be used with FSRS. A list of commonly used add-ons and their FSRS compatibility can be found in Add-on Compatibility.

More

Several frequently asked questions about FSRS have been answered in its FAQ.

For more info on FSRS, please check:

• FSRS4Anki Wiki
• FSRS4Anki on Github

Advanced

Maximum Interval

The maximum number of days a review card will wait before it's shown again. When reviews have reached the limit, Hard, Good and Easy will all give the same delay. The shorter you set this, the greater your workload will be. The default is 100 years; you can decrease this to a smaller number if you’re willing to trade extra study time for higher retention.

Historical Retention

This setting is hidden unless FSRS is turned on.

When some of your review history is missing, FSRS needs to fill in the gaps. By default, it will assume that when you did those old reviews, you remembered 90% of the material. If your old retention was appreciably higher or lower than 90%, adjusting this option will allow FSRS to better approximate the missing reviews.

Your review history may be incomplete for two reasons:

• Because you're using the Ignore cards reviewed before option.
• Because you previously deleted review logs to free up space, or imported material from a different SRS program.

The latter is quite rare, so unless you're using the former option, you probably don't need to adjust this setting.

Ignore Cards Reviews Before

If set, cards reviewed before the provided date will be ignored when optimizing FSRS parameters. This can be useful if you imported someone else's scheduling data, or have changed the way you use the answer buttons.

Starting Ease

Controls the ease that cards start out with. It is set when a card graduates from learning for the first time. It defaults to 2.50, meaning that once you have finished learning a card, answering Good on subsequent reviews will increase the delay by approximately 2.5x (e.g. if the last delay was 10 days, the next delay would be around 25 days). Based upon how you rate the card in subsequent reviews, the ease may increase or decrease from its starting value.

Easy Bonus

An extra multiplier applied to the interval when a review card is answered Easy. With the default value of 1.30, Easy will give an interval that is 1.3 times the Good interval (e.g. if the Good interval was 10 days, the Easy interval would be around 13 days).

Interval Modifier

An extra multiplier that is applied to all reviews. At its default of 1.00 it does nothing. If you set it to 0.80, intervals will be generated at 80% of their normal size (so a 10 day interval would become 8 days). You can You can thus use the multiplier to to make your reviews less or more frequent.

For moderately difficult material, the average user should find they remember approximately 90% of mature cards when they come up for review. You can find out your own performance by opening the graphs/statistics for a deck and looking at the Answer Buttons graph - mature retention is the correct% on the right side of the graph. If you haven’t been studying for long, you may not have any mature cards yet. As performance with new cards and younger cards can vary considerably, it’s a good idea to wait until you have a reasonable amount of mature reviews before you start drawing conclusions about your retention rate.

On the SuperMemo website, they suggest that you can find an appropriate multiplier for a desired retention rate. Their formula boils down to:

log(desired retention%) / log(current retention%)

Imagine we have a current retention rate of 85% and we want to increase it to 90%. We’d calculate the modifier as:

log(90%) / log(85%) = 0.65

You can use Google to calculate this.

If you enter the resulting 65% into the interval modifier, you should find over time that your retention moves closer to your desired retention.

One important thing to note however is that the trade-off between time spent studying and retention is not linear: we can see here that to increase our retention by 5 percentage points, we would have to study 35% more frequently. If the material you are learning is very important then it may be worth the extra effort – that is, of course, something you will need to decide for yourself. If you are simply worried that you are forgetting too much, then you may find investing more time at the initial learning stage, or using mnemonics will give you more gain for less effort.

One final thing to note is that Anki forces a new interval to be at least 1 day longer than it was previously, so that you do not get stuck reviewing with the same interval forever. If your goal is to repeat a card once a day for multiple days, you can do that by setting more learning mode steps, instead of by adjusting this modifier.

Hard Interval

The multiplier applied when you use the Hard button. The percentage is relative to the previous interval, e.g. with a default of 1.20, a card with a 10-day interval will be given 12 days.

New Interval

The multiplier applied when you use the Again button on a review card. The default 0.00 means that a review card's delay is reset to zero when you forget it (which then becomes 1 day after the minimum interval is applied).

If changed from the default, it is possible for forgotten cards to preserve part of their previous delay. For example, if a card had a 100 day interval, and you set the New Interval to 0.20, the new interval would be 20 days.

While preserving part of the interval may seem to make sense, SuperMemo has observed that preserving part of the delay can actually be counter-productive. For this reason, we recommend you leave it on the default setting.

Custom Scheduling

Please see this page.

Syncing with AnkiWeb

• Intro Videos
• Setup
• Automatic Syncing
• Button Color
• Media
• Conflicts
• Merging Conflicts
• Firewalls
• Proxies

AnkiWeb is a service that allows you to keep your collection synchronized across multiple devices, and to study online. Please sign up for a free account before following the steps below.

Intro Videos

For a quick introduction to syncing, please check out the syncing intro videos.

Setup

To start syncing your collection across devices, click the sync button (the top right one on the main screen, or press 'y' on your keyboard. You’ll be prompted for your AnkiWeb ID and password, which you created in the signup process.

When you synchronize your collection for the first time, Anki will ask you if you want to upload or download. If you have cards on your computer and your AnkiWeb account is empty, choose "upload" to send your data to AnkiWeb. If you have cards on AnkiWeb from another device, and no cards on your computer, choose "download" to replace the empty local collection with the cards that are on AnkiWeb. If you have different cards on both devices, more work is required to avoid losing data.

Once the initial one way sync is completed, Anki will be able to merge changes from multiple locations with a few exceptions.

If you have multiple people using Anki on one machine and have created a profile for each user, each user will need to create their own AnkiWeb account to sync with. If you attempt to synchronize multiple profiles with a single AnkiWeb account, you will lose data.

Automatic Syncing

Once syncing is enabled, Anki will automatically sync each time your collection is closed or opened. If you would prefer to synchronize manually, you can disable automatic syncing in Anki’s preferences.

Button Color

The sync button will change to blue when a normal sync is required, and red when a full sync is required.

Media

Related video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phP9GGG-PxY

Anki will synchronize any sounds and images used by your notes. It will notice when media has been added, removed or replaced in your media folder, but will not notice if you have made edits to existing files. To get your edits synced, you need to add, remove or replace a file as well.

One-way syncs (where you're prompted to upload or download) have no influence over how media syncs - media changes are always merged.

To prevent accidental data loss, deletions will only sync to other devices if they are made after media is fully in sync. If you delete files before your device is fully in sync, and the deleted files are already on AnkiWeb, they will be downloaded the next time you sync.

If you have accidentally deleted media files, and want to restore them, open the preferences and log out. The next time you sync, Anki will restore any deleted files, if they are available on AnkiWeb still.

If you’re running Anki off a USB flash drive, you should use an NTFS file system, as Anki may not be able to detect media changes on a FAT32 filesystem.

Conflicts

Related video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEAcpfMQnjo

Under normal circumstances, reviews and note edits can be merged, so if you review or edit on two different devices before syncing, Anki will preserve your changes from both locations. If the same card has been reviewed in two different locations, both reviews will be marked in the revision history, and the card will be kept in the state it was when it was most recently answered.

There are certain changes that Anki is unable to merge. These mainly relate to the format of notes: things like adding a new field, or removing a card template. When you perform an operation that can’t be merged, Anki will warn you, and give you the option of aborting the operation. If you choose to continue, you’ll be asked to choose whether to keep the local copy or the copy on AnkiWeb when your collection is next synchronized.

If certain problems are detected while syncing, it will also force a one way sync. If you find this consistently happens, please post on our support site.

When a one way sync is required, you need to choose whether you wish to keep the collection on your local device, or the collection on AnkiWeb. If changes have been made on both ends, only changes on one end can be preserved.

If you choose Upload, the content on your local device will be sent to AnkiWeb. You then need to sync your other devices, and choose "Download" to have them grab a copy of that content.

If you choose Download, it will replace any local changes you’ve made with the data that is on AnkiWeb.

Once all devices are in sync, future syncs will return to the normal behaviour of merging changes from both ends.

If you wish to force a full upload or download (for example, because you accidentally deleted a deck on one side and want to restore the deck rather than having its deletion synchronized), you can check the "On next sync, force changes in one direction" box in Tools>Preferences>Network, then sync as usual. (You’ll be given the option to choose which side you want to use.)

Forcing a one way sync only affects card syncing - media is synced as normal. If you have files that you want to remove from AnkiWeb, please ensure your client is fully in sync first. After syncing is up to date, any files you remove (e.g via the Check Media function) will be removed from AnkiWeb on the following sync.

Merging Conflicts

Because the first sync can only sync changes in one direction, if you have added different content to different devices or profiles before setting syncing up, content on one device will be lost if you overwrite it with the content from the other device. With some work, it is possible to manually merge data into a single collection.

Start by taking a backup on each device/profile, in case something goes wrong. With the computer version you can use File>Export to export "all decks" with scheduling information and media files included, and save the file somewhere safe. In AnkiMobile, the Add/Export button on the decks list screen will let you export all decks with media.

Next, if one of your devices is a mobile device, synchronize it first. If there’s a conflict, choose "upload" to overwrite any existing data on AnkiWeb with the data from your mobile device. If both devices/profiles are on your computer, synchronize the device/profile with the most number of decks first.

Now return to the other device/profile. If automatic syncing is enabled, a message may pop up asking if you want to upload or download. Click the cancel button - we don’t want to sync yet.

Once you’re looking at the deck list, click the cog icon next to the first deck, and choose "export". Export the content with scheduling information and media included, and save the .apkg file somewhere. Now you’ll need to repeat this for each top-level deck.

Once all top-level decks have been exported, click the sync button at the top right, and choose "download", which will overwrite the local content with the content you synced from your other device.

You can now use File>Import to import the .apkg files you exported earlier, which will merge the exported content with the existing content, so everything will be in one place.

Firewalls

Anki needs to be able to make outbound HTTPS connections to sync. It must be able to connect to ankiweb.net, sync.ankiweb.net, sync2.ankiweb.net, and so on. These domains may change over time, and the IP addresses they point to may also change, so we recommend you allow wildcard access to *.ankiweb.net to reduce the chance of the firewall rules needing to be updated in the future.

If you have a firewall on your machine, you should add an exception for Anki. If you are on a work or school network, please contact your network administrator for assistance - it is not something we can help you with.

Proxies

If you need a proxy to access the internet, Anki should automatically pick up your system proxy settings if you’re on Windows or macOS, and will honour the HTTP_PROXY environment variable if you’re on another platform.

Anki will only be able to pick up your system settings if a proxy is manually configured, and does not require a password. If your system uses automatic proxy setup, or uses a proxy that requires a username and password, you will need to manually tell Anki the proxy configuration.

To tell Anki your proxy settings, define a HTTPS_PROXY environmental variable that points to the proxy server. It will look like:

http://user:pass@proxy.company.com:8080

If your username or password contains an @ (e.g user@workdomain.com), you need to change it to %40, like so:

http://user%40workdomain.com:pass@proxy.company.com:8080

Anki 2.0 expects to find HTTP_PROXY instead of HTTPS_PROXY.

To set environmental variables on Windows, please see https://www.google.com/search?q=windows+set+environmental+variable

If you’re on a Mac, please see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/135688/setting-environment-variables-in-os-x

Heavily locked down networks that intercept secure connections and present their own certificates may cause Anki to throw up SSL errors. In such environments, you may be able to work around the errors using this add-on.

An alternative solution is to install a local proxy server, and point that proxy server at your normal proxy server. You can then tell Anki to use the local proxy, which will redirect requests to the proxy you normally use.

Profiles

If more than one person wants to use Anki on your computer, you can set up a separate profile for each user. Each user profile has their own collection, and own program settings. Add-ons are shared across profiles. Profiles are configured by going to the File menu and choosing "Switch Profile".

Only a single profile can be synced to an AnkiWeb account. If you have different users on your computer, each user will need to set up a separate AnkiWeb account for their profile. If you attempt to link two or more profiles to the same AnkiWeb account, you will overwrite the data from one profile with the data from the other.

Profiles are primarily intended to be used by different people, and are not recommended for splitting up your own content. If you have created multiple profiles for yourself, the best option is to merge them into a single profile. You can do so by exporting one deck from profile A, and then importing it into profile B, repeating for any other decks in profile A, until everything is in profile B.

AnkiDroid does not support profiles.

Profiles window

From the Profiles window (accessible via File>Switch Profile from the main window), you can:

• Open / Add / Rename / Delete user profiles.
• Quit the program.
• Restore an automatic backup.
• Downgrade your collection, which is necessary if you want to open it with an earlier Anki release. If you skip this step, you may get an error message when opening your collection in an older Anki version, and you will need to return to this version, downgrade, then try again.

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.

Filtered Decks & Cramming

• Custom Study
• Home Decks
• Creating Manually
• Order
• Steps & Returning
• Due Reviews
• Reviewing Ahead
• Rescheduling
• Catching Up

When you study a regular deck in Anki, only a limited number of cards are shown: the cards Anki thinks you are about to forget, and a daily limit of new cards. This is generally useful, as it ensures you don't spend more time studying than necessary. But sometimes it can be useful to step outside of these normal limits, such as when you need to review for a test, focus on particular material, and so on. To make this possible, Anki provides a different type of deck called a 'filtered deck'.

Filtered decks offer a lot of possibilities. They can be used for previewing cards, cramming cards before a test, studying particular tags, catching up on a backlog with a particular sort order, reviewing ahead of schedule, going over the day's failed cards, and more.

Custom Study

The easiest way to create a filtered deck is with the Custom Study button, which appears at the bottom of the screen when you click on a deck. It offers some convenient preset filters for common tasks like reviewing the cards that you have failed that day. It will create a filtered deck called "Custom Study Session" and automatically open it for you.

If an existing "Custom Study Session" deck exists, it will be emptied before a new one is created. If you wish to keep a custom study deck, you can rename it from the deck list.

Here is a summary of each of the options:

Increase today's new card limit
Add more new cards to the deck you are currently studying. Note that unlike other options, this does 'not' create a new filtered deck, it modifies the existing deck.

Increase today's review card limit
If not all reviews due today were shown because of the daily review limit, this option allows you to show more of them. As with the new cards option, this modifies the existing deck.

Review forgotten cards
Show all the cards, for which you've answered Again (1) within the number of days you specify.

Review ahead
Show cards that will be due in the near future (the number of days you specify). This is useful for working through some of your older cards before a vacation, but it will not help with cards you have learnt recently. Please see the reviewing ahead section below for more info.

Preview new cards
Show cards that you have recently added, without converting them to review cards as they are answered.

Study by card state or tag
Select a certain number of cards from the current deck to study. You can choose to select new cards only, due cards only, or all cards; after you click "Choose Tags", you can also limit the selected cards by tags. If you wish to see all the cards in the deck (for instance, to study before a big test), you can set the number of cards to more than the number of cards in the deck.

Home Decks

When a card is moved to a filtered deck, it retains a link to the deck, from which it came. That previous deck is said to be the card's 'home deck'.

Cards automatically return to their home deck after they are studied in the filtered deck. This can be after a single review, or after multiple reviews, depending on your settings.

It is also possible to move all cards back to their home decks at once:

• The "Empty" button in the study overview moves all cards in the filtered deck back to their home deck, but does not delete the empty filtered deck. This can be useful if you want to fill it again later (using the Rebuild button).

• Deleting a filtered deck does the same thing as "Empty" does, but also removes the emptied deck from the deck list. No cards are deleted when you delete a filtered deck.

Creating Manually

Advanced users can create filtered decks with arbitrary search strings (or 'filters'), instead of relying on the preset filters. To create a filtered deck manually, choose Create Filtered Deck from the Tools menu.

When you click the Build button, Anki finds cards that match the settings you specified, and temporarily moves them from their existing decks into your new filtered deck for study.

If you wish to fetch cards again using the same filter options (for instance, if you want to study all cards with a particular tag every day), you can use the Rebuild button at the bottom of the deck's overview screen.

The search area controls what cards Anki will gather. All of the searches possible in the browser are also possible for filtered decks, such as limiting to tags, finding cards forgotten a certain number of times, and so on. Please see the searching section of the manual for more information on the different possibilities.

Filtered decks cannot pull in cards that are suspended, buried, or already in a different filtered deck. For this reason, a search in the browser may reveal cards that do not end up in the filtered deck.

The limit option controls how many cards will be gathered into the deck. The order you select controls both the order cards are gathered in, and the order they will be reviewed in. If you select "most lapses" and a limit of 20 for example, then Anki will show you only the 20 most lapsed cards.

The enable second filter option allows you to create a filtered deck comprised of two different searches, so that you can, for example, include due cards with one order, and a smaller amount of new cards with a different order.

Order

The "cards selected by" option controls the order that cards will appear in. If the maximum number of cards you select is lower than the number of cards that match the filter criteria, Anki will exclude the cards at the end of this sorted list first.

Oldest seen first
Display those cards first, that you haven't seen in reviews for the longest time.

Random
Randomize the order of all cards that match the filter criteria (use no set order).

Increasing intervals
Display cards that have the smallest interval first.

Decreasing intervals
Display cards that have the largest interval first.

Most lapses
Display those cards first, that you have failed the most times.

Order added
Display cards that you added first (i.e. those cards that have the earliest creation date).

Order due
Display cards with the earliest due date first.

Latest added first
Display cards that you have most recently added to the deck first. (This is the opposite of 'Order added'.)

Relative overdueness
Display cards that you're most likely to have forgotten first. This is useful if you have a large backlog that may take some time to get through, and you want to reduce the chances of forgetting more cards.

When using the SM-2 algorithm, overduessness is determined by comparing how overdue cards are, and how long their interval is. For example, a card with a current interval of 5 days that is overdue by 2 days, will display before a card with a current interval of 10 days that is overdue by 3 days.

When using FSRS, overdueness is calculated based on on each card's retrievability, and the desired retention in the deck preset.

Steps & Returning

Please see the section on learning as a reminder of how steps work.

By default, Anki will use the steps of a card’s home deck. If a new card would normally be reviewed twice when being learnt, the same thing will happen when you study it in a filtered deck.

Cards return to their home deck when (re)learning is complete. Thus if you have 3 learning steps, a new card will return to its home deck upon three presses of "Good" or a single press of "Easy".

Filtered decks with rescheduling disabled show 4 buttons. The Again, Hard, and Good buttons have configurable delays. The Easy button removes cards from the filtered deck.

Due Reviews

If the filtered deck includes cards that were due for review, they will be shown like they would have been in their original deck: they appear in the review card count at the bottom of the screen, and there are four choices for how well you remembered. Upon a correct answer, the card will be moved back to its home deck, and its next delay adjusted using the home deck's settings. If you forget the card, it will be shown according to the relearning steps defined in the home deck.

Reviewing Ahead

If your search included cards that are not due, Anki will show the reviews ahead of time.

Anki uses a special algorithm for these reviews that takes into account how early you are reviewing. If the cards were almost due to be shown, they will be given a new delay similar to what they would have received if you had reviewed them on time. If the cards are reviewed soon after they were scheduled however, their new delay will be similar to their previous delay. This calculation works on a sliding scale.

Because reviewing a card shortly after it is scheduled has little impact on scheduling (e.g. a card due tomorrow with a one day interval will remain due tomorrow if reviewed early), the "review ahead" custom study setting is not appropriate for repeated use. If used to go through a week's worth of cards before a trip, the mature cards will be rescheduled into the future and the new cards will remain at small intervals, because you don't know them well enough for them to be rescheduled further. If you review ahead again the next day, all you'll end up doing is going through those same new cards again, to little benefit.

Rescheduling

By default, Anki will return cards to their home decks with altered scheduling, based on your performance in the filtered deck.

To change this behaviour, turn off Reschedule cards based on my answers. When this is turned off, cards are shown in a simple "preview mode", and when they are returned to their original deck, they are returned exactly as they started.

Catching Up

Filtered decks can be useful for catching up when you've fallen behind in your reviews. One Anki user describes the way they use the filtered decks to catch up as follows:

I did this for a backlog of 800 cards with filtered subdecks. Worked
very well for me.

Just Due filter with: "is:due prop:due>-7"

Over Due filter with: "is:due prop:due<=-7"

The Just Due deck will then contain cards that became due in the past
week. That's the deck you should study every day as it gets the cards
that become due regularly. With this you can study as if there weren't
any backlog.

The Over Due deck will contain your backlog — cards which you didn't
study in time. You can study them the same way you would study new
cards. They go back into the regular cards, so the number of overdue
will never grow as long as you keep your Just Due deck in check.

How long it takes depends on how many overdue cards you study each day
in addition to the ones that become due regularly. You can still motor
through them when you feel like it - or you can do a specific number per
day like you would for new cards. Up to you.

Searching

• Simple searches
• Limiting to a field
• Tags, decks, cards and notes
• Ignoring accents/combining characters
• Regular expressions
• Card state
• Flags
• Card properties
• Recent Events
  • Added
  • Edited
  • Answered
  • First Answered
• Matching special characters
  • Raw input
• Object IDs
• Other Searches

Anki's Browse screen and the Filtered Deck feature use a common method of searching for specific cards/notes. This method can also be used to adjust the scope of FSRS optimization.

Simple searches

When you type some text into the search box, Anki finds matching notes and displays their cards. Anki searches in all fields of the notes, but does not search for tags (see later in this section to search for tags). Some examples:

dog
searches for "dog" - will match words like "doggy" and "underdog" too.

dog cat
finds notes that have both "dog" and "cat" on them, such as "raining cats and dogs".

dog or cat
finds notes with either "dog" or "cat".

dog (cat or mouse)
finds notes with "dog" and "cat", or "dog" and "mouse".

-cat
finds notes without "cat".

-cat -mouse
finds notes with neither "cat" nor "mouse".

-(cat or mouse)
same as the above.

"a dog"
finds notes with the exact sequence of characters "a dog" in them, such as "atta dog", but not "dog a" or "adog".

-"a dog"
finds notes without the exact sequence of characters "a dog" in them.

d_g
finds notes with d, <one character>, g, like dog, dig, dug, and so on.

d*g
finds notes with d, <zero or more characters>, g, like dg, dog, dung, etc.

w:dog
searches for the word "dog" as opposed to a sequence of characters - will match "dog", but not "doggy" or "underdog". Requires Anki 2.1.24+, AnkiMobile 2.1.61+, or AnkiDroid 2.17+. Note that formatting changes may be interpreted as word boundaries, e.g. searching for w:exam will match example, as the "exam" part of example is in bold format.

w:dog*
will match "dog" and "doggy", but not "underdog".

w:*dog
will match "dog" and "underdog", but not "doggy".

Things to note from the above:

• Search terms are separated by spaces.

• When multiple search terms are provided, Anki looks for notes that match all of the terms - an implicit and is inserted between each term. On Anki 2.1.24+, AnkiMobile 2.0.60+, and AnkiDroid 2.17+ you can be explicit if you like (dog and cat is the same as dog cat), but older Anki versions will treat and as just another word to search for.

• You can use or if you only need one of the terms to match.

• You can prepend a minus sign (-) to a term to find notes that don’t match the term.

• You can group search terms by placing them in parentheses, as in the dog (cat or mouse) example. This becomes important when combining OR and AND searches — in the example, with the parentheses, it matches either "dog cat" or "dog mouse", whereas without them it would match either "dog and cat" or "mouse".

• Anki is only able to search within formatting in the sort field you’ve configured. For example, if you add "example" to one of your fields, with the "exa" part in bold, this will not be matched when searching for example unless that field is the sort field. If a word is not formatted, or the formatting does not change in the middle of the word, then Anki will be able to find it in any field.

• Standard searches are case insensitive for Latin characters - a-z will match A-Z, and vice versa. Other characters such as Cyrillic are case sensitive in a standard search, but can be made case insensitive by searching on a word boundary or regular expression (w:, re:).

Limiting to a field

You can also ask Anki to match only if a particular field contains some text. Unlike the previous search examples, searching in fields requires an exact match by default.

front:dog
finds notes with a Front field of exactly "dog". A field that says "a dog" will not match.

"animal front:a dog"
finds notes where the "Animal Front" field is exactly "a dog". The double quotes are mandatory: see later in this section.

front:*dog*
finds notes where the Front field contains dog somewhere.

front:
finds notes that have an empty Front field.

front:_*
findd notes that have a non-empty Front field.

front:*
finds notes that have a Front field, empty or not.

fr*:text
finds notes in a field starting with "fr". Requires Anki 2.1.24+, AnkiMobile 2.1.60+, or AnkiDroid 2.17+.

Tags, decks, cards and notes

tag:animal
finds notes with the tag "animal", or subtags like "animal::mammal".

tag:none
finds notes with no tags.

tag:ani*
finds notes with tags starting with "ani".

deck:french
find cards in a top-level deck called "French", or its subdecks like "French::Words". It will not match subdecks with that name, such as "Languages::French".

deck:french::words
find cards in the "French::Words" subdeck.

deck:french -deck:french::*
finds cards in "French", but not its subdecks.

deck:"french words"
searching when the deck name has a space.

"deck:french words"
same as earlier.

deck:filtered
filtered decks only.

-deck:filtered
normal decks only.

preset:"Default"
cards in all decks that use the "Default" deck options preset. Requires Anki 23.10+, AnkiMobile 23.10+ or AnkiDroid 2.17+.

card:forward
finds cards created by a card type named "Forward".

card:1
searches for cards by card type number, e.g. to find the second cloze deletion for a note, you’d use card:2

note:basic
searches for cards created with a note type named "Basic".

Ignoring accents/combining characters

Requires Anki 2.1.24+, AnkiMobile 2.0.60+ or AnkiDroid 2.17+.

You can use nc: (nc stands for "no combining") to make Anki ignore combining characters. For example:

nc:uber
matches notes with "uber", "über", "Über" and so on.

nc:は
matches "は", "ば", and "ぱ".

Searches that ignore combining characters are slower than regular searches.

Regular expressions

Anki 2.1.24+, AnkiMobile 2.0.60+ and AnkiDroid 2.17+ support searching in notes with "regular expressions", a standard and powerful way of searching in text.

Start a search with re: to search using regular expressions. To make things easier, Anki will treat the following as raw input, so bear in mind the rules listed there.

Some examples:

"re:(some|another).*thing"
finds notes that have "some" or "another" on them, followed by 0 or more characters, and then "thing".

re:\d{3}
finds notes that have 3 digits in a row.

Regular expressions can also be limited to a specific field. Please note that unlike the normal searches in a specific field, regular expressions in fields don't require an exact match:

front:re:[a-c]1
matches uppercase or lowercase a1, B1 or c1 that occurs anywhere in the "Front" field.

front:re:^[a-c]1$
same as the previous example, but will not match if any other text falls before or after a1/b1/c1.

Anki 2.1.50+ supports regular expressions for tags:

tag:re:^parent$
finds notes with the exact tag "parent", disregarding any child tags like "parent::child".

"tag:re:lesson-(1[7-9]|2[0-5])"
finds notes with tags "lesson-17" through "lesson-25".

For more information on regular expressions, see this website.

Some things to be aware of:

• The search is case-insensitive by default; use (?-i) at the start to turn on case sensitivity.
• Some text like spaces and newlines may be represented differently in HTML - you can use the HTML editor in the editing screen to see the underlying HTML contents.
• For the specifics of Anki's regex support, see the regex crate documentation.

Card state

is:due
review cards and learning cards waiting to be studied.

is:new
new cards.

is:learn
cards in learning.

is:review
reviews (both due and not due) and lapsed cards.

is:suspended
cards that have been automatically or manually suspended.

is:buried
cards that have been either automatically or manually buried.

is:buried-sibling
cards that have been buried automatically.

is:buried-manually
cards that have been manually buried.

Cards that have lapsed fall into several of the previous categories, so it may be useful to combine different search terms to get more precise results:

is:learn is:review
cards that have lapsed and are awaiting relearning.

-is:learn is:review
review cards, not including lapsed cards.

is:learn -is:review
cards that are in learning for the first time.

Flags

flag:1
cards with a red flag.

flag:2
cards with an orange flag.

flag:3
cards with a green flag.

flag:4
cards with a blue flag.

flag:5
cards with a pink flag.

flag:6
cards with a turquoise flag.

flag:7
cards with a purple flag.

Card properties

prop:ivl>=10
cards with interval of 10 days or more.

prop:due=1
cards due tomorrow.

prop:due=-1
cards due yesterday that haven’t been answered yet.

prop:due>=1
all cards due in the future, including tomorrow.

prop:due<=-1
all overdue cards.

prop:due>-1 prop:due<1
cards due yesterday, today and tomorrow.

prop:reps<10
cards that have been answered less than 10 times.

prop:lapses>3
cards that been lapsed more than 3 times.

prop:ease!=2.5
cards easier or harder than default ease.

prop:cdn:d>5
cards with the value of d in custom data (usually refers to difficulty in FSRS) greater than 5 (requires Anki 2.1.64+).

prop:cds:v=reschedule
cards with the string v in custom data equal to reschedule (requires Anki 23.10+).

The following searches require Anki 23.10+ and FSRS enabled:

prop:s>21
cards with stability greater than 21 days.

prop:d>0.3
cards with difficulty greater than 0.3.

prop:r<0.9
cards with retrievability less than 0.9.

Recent Events

Added

added:1
cards added today.

added:7
cards added in the last 7 days.

The check is made against card creation time rather than note creation time, so cards that were generated within the time frame will be included even if their notes were added a long time ago.

Edited

edited:n
cards where the note text was added/edited in the last n days.

This requires Anki 2.1.28+ or AnkiMobile 2.0.64+.

Answered

rated:1
cards answered today.

rated:1:2
cards answered Hard (2) today.

rated:7:1
cards answered Again (1) in the last 7 days.

rated:31:4
cards answered Easy (4) in the last 31 days.

Anki 2.1.39+ supports rating searches over 31 days.

First Answered

Requires Anki 2.1.45+.

introduced:1
cards answered for the first time today.

introduced:365
cards answered for the first time within the last 365 days.

Matching special characters

If you're using a version earlier than Anki 2.1.36 the following searches may not work.

As shown in the previous section, some characters like *, _ and " have a special meaning in search. If you need to locate those characters in a search, you need to tell Anki not to treat them specially. This is called "escaping a character" and is primarily done by using double quotes and backslashes.

• Space
  To match something that includes spaces, enclose the "entire term" in double quotes. If it is a colon search, you also have the option to only quote the part:"after the colon".

• And/Or
  To search for these words, wrap them with double quotes. For example, dog "and" cat searches for "dog", "cat" and the word "and". If you wrap the entire search term with quotes like in the previous example, you do not need to escape and or or.

• ", * and _
  Add a backslash before these characters to treat them literally. For example, _ will match any single character, but \_ matches only an actual underscore.

• \
  Because a backlash is used to remove the special meaning from other characters, it too is treated specially. If you need to search for an actual backslash, use \\ instead of \.

• ( and )
  You can search for parentheses by enclosing the entire term in quotes, by using a backslash, or both at the same time. For example, "(text)", \(text\) and "\(text\)" are all equivalent searches, and search for (text).

• -
  Starting a search term with - usually inverts it: -dog matches everything except dog for example. If you instead wish to include an actual hyphen, you can either use a backslash, or include the text in quotes. For example, \-free or "-free" will match "guilt-free" and "cruelty-free".

• :
  Colons have to be escaped using backslashes unless they are preceded by another, unescaped colon. For example, w:3:30 searches for "3:30" on word boundary and doesn't require you to use a backslash. However, if you don't use a colon search, the colons need to be escaped like this: 3\:30.

• &, <, and >
&, <, and > are treated as HTML when searching in Anki, and as such, searches containing them don't work as expected. However, you can search for them by using their corresponding HTML entity names (& for &, < for <, and > for >). For example, searching &text searches for a note with &text in a field.

Raw input

Text preceded by certain keywords (like re:) will be treated as raw input. That is, the characters listed above largely lose their special meaning. In such a context, only a minimum of escaping is required to prevent ambiguity:

• Double quotes (") must be escaped.

• Spaces and unescaped parentheses require the search term to be quoted.

• The search term must not end in an odd number of backslashes.

Object IDs

nid:123
the note with note id 123.

cid:123,456,789
all cards with card ids 123, 456, or 789.

Note and card IDs can be found in the card info dialog in the browser. These searches may also be helpful when doing add-on development or otherwise working closely with the database.

Other Searches

prop:due=1 is:learn
interday learning cards due for tommorow.

prop:due=0 is:learn -introduced:1
interday learning cards due today.

prop:resched=0
cards rescheduled today, either using Set due date or Reschedule cards on change.

Importing

Anki can import text files, packaged Anki decks created by the export feature, Mnemosyne 2.0 .db files, and SuperMemo .xml files. To import a file, click the File menu and then "Import".

Text Files

• Spreadsheets and UTF-8
• HTML
• Importing Media
• Bulk Media
• Adding Tags
• Duplicates and Updating
• File Headers
  • Notetype Column
  • Deck Column
  • GUID Column

Any plain text file that contains fields separated by commas, semicolons or tabs can be imported into Anki, provided some conditions are met.

• The files must be plain text (myfile.txt). Other formats like myfile.xls, myfile.rtf, myfile.doc must be saved as a plain text file first.

• The files must be in UTF-8 format (see below).

• The first line also defines the separating character – if Anki finds a ';' on the first line it will use that, if it finds a comma it’ll use that, etc.

• Anki determines the number of fields in the file by looking at the first (non-commented) line. If some of the later records in the file contain fewer fields, Anki will treat the missing fields as if they were blank. If some of your records contain extra fields, the extra content will not be imported.

Fields in your text file can be mapped to any field in your notes, including the tags field. You can choose which field in the text file corresponds to which field in the note when you import.

When you import a text file, you can choose what deck to put the cards in. Keep in mind that if you have the deck override option set for one or more of your templates, the cards will go to that deck rather than the one you’ve selected.

This is an example of a valid file with three fields:

apple;banana;grape
some text;other text;yet more text

There are two ways to include newlines or the field separator in fields.

Escape the characters by placing the contents of the field in quotation marks:

hello;"this is
a two line answer"
two;this is a one line field
"this includes a ; (semicolon)";another field

Because quotes are used to mark where a field begins and ends, if you wish to include them inside your field, you need to replace a single doublequote with two doublequotes to "escape" them from the regular handling, like so:

field one;"field two with ""escaped quotes"" inside it"

When you use a spreadsheet program like Libreoffice to create the CSV file for you, it will automatically take care of escaping double quotes.

Use HTML new lines:

hello; this is<br>a two line answer
two; this is a one line one

You need to turn on the "allow HTML in fields" checkbox in the import dialog for HTML newlines to work.

Escaped multi-lines will not work correctly if you are using cloze deletions that span multiple lines. In this case, please use HTML newlines instead.

You can also include tags in another field and select it as a tags field in the import dialog:

first field;second field;tags

This is an example of a valid file where the first line is ignored (#):

# this is a comment and is ignored
foo bar;bar baz;baz quux
field1;field2;field3

Spreadsheets and UTF-8

If you have non-Latin characters in your file (such as accents, Japanese and so on), Anki expects files to be saved in a 'UTF-8 encoding'. The easiest way to do this is to use the free LibreOffice spreadsheet program instead of Excel to edit your file, as it supports UTF-8 easily, and also exports multi-line content properly, unlike Excel. If you wish to keep using Excel, please see this forum post for more information.

To save your spreadsheet to a file Anki can read with LibreOffice, go to File>Save As, and then select CSV for the type of file. After accepting the default options, LibreOffice will save the file and you can then import the saved file into Anki.

HTML

Anki can treat text imported from text files as HTML (the language used for web pages). This means that text with bold, italics and other formatting can be exported to a text file and imported again. If you want to include HTML formatting, you can check the "allow HTML in fields" checkbox when importing. You may wish to turn this off if you’re trying to import cards whose content contains angle brackets or other HTML syntax.

If you wish to use HTML for formatting your file but also wish to include angle brackets or ampersands, you may use the following replacements:

Importing Media

If you want to include audio and pictures from a text file import, copy the files into the collection.media folder. Do not put subdirectories in the media folder, or some features will not work.

After you’ve copied the files, change one of the fields in your text file as follows.

<img src="myimage.jpg">

or

[sound:myaudio.mp3]

Alternatively, you can use the find and replace feature in the browse screen to update all the fields at once. If each field contains text like "myaudio", and you wish to make it play a sound, you’d search for (.*) and replace it with "[sound:\1.mp3]", with the 'regular expressions' option enabled.

When importing a text file with these references, you must make sure to enable the "Allow HTML" option.

You might be tempted to do this in a template, like:

<img src="{{field name}}">

Anki doesn’t support this for two reasons: searching for used media is expensive, as each card has to be rendered, and such functionality isn’t obvious to shared deck users. Please use the find & replace technique instead.

Bulk Media

Another option for importing large amounts of media at once is to use the media import add-on. This add-on will automatically create notes for all files in a folder you select, with the filenames on the front (minus the file extension, so if you have a file named apple.jpg, the front would say 'apple') and the images or audio on the back. If you would like a different arrangement of media and filenames, you can change the note type of the created cards afterwards.

Adding Tags

If you want to add 'tag1' and 'tag2' to every line you’re importing, add the following to the top of the text file:

tags:tag1 tag2

Duplicates and Updating

When importing text files, Anki uses the first field to determine if a note is unique. By default, if the file you are importing has a first field that matches one of the existing notes in your collection and that existing note is the same type as the type you’re importing, the existing note’s other fields will be updated based on content of the imported file. A drop-down box in the import screen allows you to change this behaviour, to either ignore duplicates completely, or import them as new notes instead of updating existing ones.

The 'match scope' setting controls how duplicates are identified. When 'note type' is selected, Anki will identify a duplicate if another note with the same note type has the same first field. When set to 'note type and deck', a duplicate will only be flagged if the existing note also happens to be in the deck you are importing into.

If you have updating turned on and older versions of the notes you’re importing are already in your collection, they will be updated in place (in their current decks) rather than being moved to the deck you have set in the import dialog. If notes are updated in place, the existing scheduling information on all their cards will be preserved.

For info on how duplicates are handled in .apkg files, please see the Deck Packages section.

File Headers

Anki 2.1.54+ supports certain headers that can be included in the text file to make importing more powerful or convenient. They consist of #key:value pairs and must be listed in separate lines at the top of the file, though the tags line may precede them. Since header lines start with the comment character #, earlier Anki clients will just ignore them.

You must enable the new importing option in the preferences screen to use this on 2.1.54. On 2.1.55, the new importing path is the default.

Some headers have further implications.

Notetype Column

Usually, all notes from a file will be mapped to a single note type, and you may choose which column should be mapped to which field of that note type.

That changes, if there is a column with note type names or ids. This allows to import notes with different note types, and their fields will be mapped implicitly: The first regular column is used for the first field of any note regardless of its note type, the second regular column for the second field, and so on. A 'regular column' here being a column that does not contain special information like decks, tags, note types or GUIDs.

Deck Column

Usually, any new cards created as a result of importing a text file will be placed in a single deck of your choice. If the file contains a deck column, however, new cards of a note will be placed in its specified deck instead. If the deck does not exist, a deck with the given name will be created.

GUID Column

GUID stands for Globally Unique Identifier. When you create notes in Anki, Anki assigns each note a unique ID, which can be used for duplicate checking. If you export your notes with the GUID included, you can make changes to the notes, and as long as you do not modify the GUID field, you'll be able to import the notes back in to update the existing notes.

Please note that the GUID is intended to be created by Anki. If you are creating your own IDs, such as MYNOTE0001, then it's recommended that you place the IDs in the first field, instead of assigning them to Anki's internal GUID. When importing, Anki is able to use either the first field or the GUID for duplicate checking, so you do not need to make IDs a GUID in order to be able to update your notes.

One other thing to note is that the 'duplicate' option will not work for rows that have a non-empty GUID. If a GUID is provided, and already exists in the collection, a duplicate will not be created.

Packaged Decks

• Scheduling
• Updating
  • Anki 23.10 and Later
    • Note to Deck Authors

Anki packages (.apkg files) enable you to import decks, notes, note types, and cards from other users. They are commonly shared on AnkiWeb.

Scheduling

Anki packages may also contain scheduling information, which is useful if you want to transfer decks between devices or profiles. However, when importing a deck shared by someone else, you typically do not want to adopt their card intervals or review history.

If you encounter imported cards with unexpectedly large intevals, the deck author may accidentally have included their scheduling information. You can use the Set Due Date feature to reset the imported cards. On Anki 23.10 and later, you can remove any scheduling information during the import process by leaving the "Import any learning progress" option unselected. This will also remove any "leech" or "marked" tags from the imported cards.

Updating

When you import an .apkg file, Anki will identify any notes in it that are already in your collection due to a previous import. If the notes in the file are newer than your local copy, the notes will be updated with the contents of the file by default.

This updating process is generally not possible if the note type is changed (e.g. if either you or the deck author do things like add an extra field to the note type). You will still be able to import any missing notes from the file, but notes you have imported previously will not be updated if the deck author has made changes.

Anki 23.10 and Later

Anki 23.10 introduced more flexibility: You can choose to unconditionally update notes and note types, always overwriting your modifications, or, on the other hand, never update existing objects.

Also, if both you and the deck author modified the same note type, you can now decide to merge the two versions. This will preserve all templates and fields contained in either one, but will require a full sync, and may mark other existing notes as modified.

Note to Deck Authors

Merging relies on template and field ids, which were introduced in Anki 2.1.67. If a template or field lacks an id, because it has been created with an earlier release, Anki attempts to find an equivalent by comparing names.

See this this add-on for why it is advantageous to share note types with field and template ids, and how to add them to existing ones.

Exporting

• Text Files
• Packaged Decks
  • Collection (.colpkg)
  • Deck (.apkg)

Exporting allows you to save part of your collection as a text file or packaged Anki deck. To export, click the File menu and choose 'Export'.

Text Files

If you choose "Notes in Plain Text", Anki will write the contents of the notes into a text file. Each field is separated by a tab. If you edit the resulting file and don't modify the first field, you can later import that file back into Anki and Anki will update your notes based on your edits, provided you import back into the same note type.

If you find yourself needing to edit the first field as well, you'll need to change the format of your note type so that the first field is an ID number rather than actual text. (You can install the Add note id add-on to make this easier.)

In order for formatting to be preserved when you import text back in, the text is exported with all the HTML formatting embedded in it.

Packaged Decks

A 'packaged deck' consists of cards, notes, note types, and any sounds or images bundled up into a file ending with .apkg or .colpkg. You can use packaged decks to transfer cards between people, or for backing up parts of your collection.

There are two different kinds of packaged decks.

Collection (.colpkg)

When you export all decks with scheduling included, this is called a 'collection package'. Anki will copy your entire collection into a file ending in .colpkg, and place it on your desktop. A collection package is used to back up your collection, or copy it to another device.

Collection packages created with previous versions of Anki were called collection.apkg.

When this file is later imported, Anki will delete all the current cards in the collection, and replace the collection with the items in the file. This is useful for copying your collection back and forth between devices.

Existing media in your collection is not deleted when you import a collection package. To delete unused media, use Tools>Check Media.

If you choose Anki 2.1.50+ Collection Package format, imports and exports will be faster, and media files will be compressed, but the resulting .colpkg file will not be readable by older Anki clients.

Deck (.apkg)

Deck packages contain a single deck (and any child decks it may have). They have a filename ending with .apkg, but a filename other than collection.apkg. When you import a deck package, Anki will add the contents into your collection, rather than overwriting your collection.

If some notes in the deck package have previously been imported, Anki will keep the version with the most recent modification time. So if you download an updated deck, the edits that have been made in the updated version will be made in your collection as well, but if you re-import an unchanged deck after making edits in your collection, the changes in your collection will be kept.

If you choose not to include scheduling information, Anki will assume that you are sharing the deck with other people, and will remove marked and leech tags so that they will have a clean copy of it.

Backups

• Automatic backups
  • Restoring
  • Creating
• Manual colpkg backups
  • Restoring
  • Creating
• AnkiWeb
• Deletion log

Automatic backups

Anki will create automatic backups of your card data. These include the text on your cards and your scheduling information, but do not include sounds or image files.

Automatic backups can be useful to recover from mistakes, but you should not rely solely on them. Because they are stored on your local device, they will not protect you if your device breaks or is stolen. We recommend you combine them with manual backups.

Restoring

To restore from an automatic backup:

• Open Anki, and choose Switch Profile from the File menu.
• Click on the "Open Backup" button.
• Select the backup you wish to restore from.

When restoring from a backup, any changes made since the backup was created will be lost.

Anki disables automatic syncing and backups when you restore from a backup. Once you're happy that you've restored the correct backup, close and re-open Anki to return to normal.

Creating

Backups are created periodically. You can configure the time between backups in the preferences screen. The default is 30 minutes.

Certain operations will trigger a backup, even if the configured time has not elapsed yet:

• A one-way sync download
• Importing a .colpkg file using File>Import
• Tools>Check Database

After backups are two days old, Anki will start removing some of the older ones. You can control how many daily, weekly and monthly backups you'd like to keep.

Backups created with 2.1.50 will not be importable into older Anki versions.

Manual colpkg backups

Restoring

You can restore from a manual backup by using File>Import.

Creating

In Anki 2.1.50+, you can use File>Create Backup to trigger an immediate backup. This functions like regular automatic backups, and does not include media files.

To create a backup that includes your sounds and images:

• Select Export from the File menu.
• Ensure "Anki collection package (.colpkg)" is selected.
• Enable the "include media" option.

This will create a .colpkg file that contains all of your cards and any sounds/images they use. We recommend you store the file somewhere safe, like a different device, or a cloud-based file storage service like Dropbox or Google Drive.

AnkiWeb

Synchronising your collection with AnkiWeb provides some level of protection against your device being lost or stolen. If you need to restore your collection from AnkiWeb, you can force a one-way sync in the preferences screen, or sync from a new device, and then choose "Download".

Deletion log

Anki logs deleted notes to a text file called deleted.txt in your profile folder. These notes are in a text format that can be read by File>Import, though please note the import feature only supports a single note type at one time, so if you have deleted notes from different note types, you'll need to split the file into separate files for each note type first.

Managing Files and Your Collection

• Checking Your Collection
• File Locations
• Startup Options
• DropBox and File Syncing
• Network Filesystems
• Running from a Flash Drive
• Backups
• Inaccessible Harddisk
• Permissions of Temp Folder
• Corrupt Collections
  • Linux/macOS
  • Windows
  • Final Step

Checking Your Collection

It is a good idea to occasionally check your collection file for problems. You can do this via the Tools>Check Database menu item. Checking the database ensures the file has not been corrupted, rebuilds some internal structures, and optimizes the file.

When you check the database, your tag list is also rebuilt. When you delete individual decks or cards, Anki does not update the list of used tags, as it's inefficient to do so. If you want to clear old tags out from the list that are no longer in use, checking your database is the way to do it.

Please note that Anki will automatically optimize your collection once every 2 weeks. This optimization ensures the collection performs well, but it does not check for errors or rebuild the tag list when automatically optimizing.

File Locations

On Windows, the latest Anki versions store your Anki files in your appdata folder. You can access it by opening the file manager, and typing %APPDATA%\Anki2 in the location field. Older versions of Anki stored your Anki files in a folder called Anki in your Documents folder.

On Mac computers, recent Anki versions store all their files in the ~/Library/Application Support/Anki2 folder. The Library folder is hidden by default, but can be revealed in Finder by holding down the option key while clicking on the Go menu. If you're on an older Anki version, your Anki files will be in your Documents/Anki folder.

On Linux, recent Anki versions store your data in ~/.local/share/Anki2, or $XDG_DATA_HOME/Anki2 if you have set a custom data path. If you are using a third-party Flatpak build, your files will be in ~/.var/app/net.ankiweb.Anki/data/Anki2/. Older versions of Anki stored your files in ~/Documents/Anki or ~/Anki.

Within the Anki folder, the program-level and profile-level preferences are stored in a file called prefs.db.

There is also a separate folder for each profile. The folder contains:

• Your notes, decks, cards and so on in a file called collection.anki2

• Your audio and images in a collection.media folder

• A backups folder

• Some system files

You should never copy or move your collection while Anki is open. Doing so could cause your collection to become corrupt. Please do not move or modify the other files in the folder either.

Startup Options

If you have made a destructive change on one computer and have an undamaged copy on another computer, you may wish to start Anki without syncing in order to use the full sync option without first downloading the changes. Similarly, if you are experiencing problems with Anki, you might need to (or might be instructed to) disable add-ons temporarily to see if one might be causing the problem. To do both of these things at the same time, you can open Anki in safe mode by holding down the Shift key while starting Anki. Keep holding Shift down until the on-screen message informs you that Anki has started in safe mode.

It is possible to specify a custom folder location during startup. This is an advanced feature that is primarily intended to be used with portable installations, and we recommend you use the default location in most circumstances.

The syntax to specify an alternate folder is as follows:

anki -b /path/to/anki/folder

• If you have multiple profiles, you can pass -p <name> to load a specific profile.

• If you pass -p some-fake-name, Anki will show the profile screen on startup. If no profile is provided, the last-used profile is loaded.

• To change the interface language, use -l <iso 639-1 language code>, such as "-l ja" for Japanese.

If you always want to use a custom folder location, you can modify your shortcut to Anki. On Windows, right-click on the shortcut, choose Properties, select the Shortcut tab, and add "-b \path\to\data\folder" after the path to the program, which should leave you with something like

"C:\Program Files\Anki\anki.exe" -b "C:\AnkiDataFolder"

You can also use this technique with the -l option to easily use Anki in different languages.

On Windows, you should use a backslash (\) not a forward slash (/).

On a Mac there is no easy way to alter the behaviour when clicking on the Anki icon, but it is possible to start Anki with a custom base folder from a terminal:

open /Applications/Anki.app --args -b ~/myankifolder

Alternatively, you can define the environment variable "ANKI_BASE". On Windows, you can define the environment variable with:

set "ANKI_BASE=C:/path/to/AnkiDataFolder"

On Linux and macOS, you can use:

export ANKI_BASE="/path/to/AnkiDataFolder"

DropBox and File Syncing

We do not recommend you sync your Anki folder directly with a third-party synchronization service, as it can lead to database corruption when files are synced while in use.

If you just want to synchronize your media, you can link external folders into services like DropBox. Please see DropboxWiki: Sync Folders Outside Dropbox (archive.org) for more info.

If you wish to keep your collection in sync as well, it is strongly recommended that you create a script that copies your files from your synced folder to a local folder, launches Anki, and then copies the files back when Anki is closed. This will ensure that the files are never synchronized while they are open.

Network Filesystems

We strongly recommend you have Anki store your files on a local hard disk, as network filesystems can lead to database corruption. If a network filesystem is your only option, regular use of Tools>Check Database to detect corruption is recommended.

Running from a Flash Drive

On Windows, Anki can be installed on a USB / flash drive and run as a portable application. The following example assumes your USB drive is drive G.

• Copy the \Program Files\Anki folder to the flash drive, so you have a folder like G:\Anki.

• Create a text file called G:\anki.bat with the following text:

  g:\anki\anki.exe -b g:\ankidata

If you would like to prevent the black command prompt window from remaining open, you can instead use:

start /b g:\anki\anki.exe -b g:\ankidata

• Double-clicking on anki.bat should start Anki with the user data stored in G:\ankidata.

The full path including drive letter is required - if you try using \anki\anki.exe instead you will find syncing stops working.

Media syncing with AnkiWeb may not work if your flash drive is formatted as FAT32. Please format the drive as NTFS to ensure media syncs correctly.

Backups

Please see this section.

Inaccessible Harddisk

If Anki can't write to files in the Anki folder, a message will be displayed on startup saying that Anki can't write to the harddisk, and Anki will close. If you're unsure how to fix the permissions, please contact someone near you who is knowledgeable about computers and can help you out.

Permissions of Temp Folder

Anki uses the system's temporary folder to store temporary data. If the permissions of this folder have been changed from the default settings by a rogue app or buggy antivirus app, Anki will not function properly.

If you're on a Windows 7 machine, the general steps to fix the problem are listed below. As this is somewhat complicated, please ask someone knowledgeable about Windows if you are not sure.

1. Click on the start bar, and type in %temp% (including the percents), then hit Enter.

2. Go up one folder, and locate the temp folder. Right click on it, and choose Properties.

3. In the security tab, click on Advanced.

4. Click on the Owner tab. If you're not listed as the owner, click the button to take ownership.

5. On the permissions tab, ensure that you have full control. On a default W7 install the control will actually be inherited from c:\users\your-username.

Corrupt Collections

Anki uses a file format that is robust against program and computer crashes, but it's still possible for your collection to become corrupt if the files are modified while Anki is open, stored on a network drive, or corrupted by a bug.

When you run Tools>Check Database, you will receive a message if Anki detects the file has been corrupted. The best way to recover from this is to restore from the most recent automatic backup, but if your backup is too old, then you can attempt to repair the corruption instead.

On Linux, make sure sqlite3 is installed. On a Mac, it should be installed already. On Windows, download http://www.sqlite.org/sqlite-3_6_23.zip.

Next, create a backup of your collection.anki2 file, in case something goes wrong with the steps below.

Linux/macOS

Open a terminal, change to the folder your collection is located in, and type:

sqlite3 collection.anki2 .dump > dump.txt

Open the resulting dump.txt file in a text editor, and look at the final line. If it reads "rollback;", change it to "commit;"

Then run the following in a terminal:

cat dump.txt | sqlite3 temp.file

Make sure you use temp.file - do not put collection.anki2 on the right, or you will blank out the file. When you're done, proceed to the final step.

Windows

Copy the sqlite3.exe program and your deck to your desktop. Then go to Start>Run and type in cmd.exe.

If you're on a recent Windows, the command prompt may not start on your desktop. If you don't see desktop displayed in the command prompt, type something like the following, replacing 'administrator' with your login name.

cd C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop

Then type:

sqlite3 collection.anki2 .dump > dump.txt

Open the resulting dump.txt file in a text editor, and look at the final line. If it reads "rollback;", change it to "commit;"

Then run the following in a terminal:

type dump.txt | sqlite3 temp.file

Make sure you use temp.file - do not put collection.anki2 on the right, or you will blank out the file. When you're done, proceed to the final step.

Final Step

Check that you didn't get an error message, and that temp.file is not empty. The procedure optimizes the collection in the process, so it's normal for the new file to be somewhat smaller than the old one.

When you've confirmed the file is not empty:

• rename the original collection.anki2 file to something else

• rename temp.file to collection.anki2

• move collection.anki2 back into your collection folder, overwriting the old version

• start Anki and go to Tools>Check Database to make sure the collection has been successfully restored.

Card Info, Graphs and Statistics

• Card Info
• Statistics
• Selecting Decks / Collection
  • Deck.
  • Collection
  • History
  • More
• Today
• The Graphs
• Manual Analysis

Card Info

You can display information about a card by using the Cards>Info menu item, by right-clicking on the card and then selecting Info, or by pressing I on the review screen.

A few notes:

Position
It shows the order the card will appear in relative to other new cards. The position can be changed in the browser. Once a card has been studied, the position is not used, unless the card is manually reset to new again.

Interval
The delay from one review to the next. Times are abbreviated; "0s, 1m, 3h, 4d, 5mo, 6y" refers to seconds, minutes, hours, days, months and years respectively.

Ease
The approximate amount the interval will grow when you answer a review card with the "Good" button.

The bottom section shows the review history for the card. Rating denotes the button (1 = Again, 4 = Easy). When cards are manually rescheduled using the "reset" or "set due date" actions, the type will be listed as Manual and the rating as 0.

Statistics

The statistics window is accessed by clicking on Stats button at the top of the main window, or by pressing T.

Selecting Decks / Collection

Deck.

By default, the statistics window will show statistics from the currently selected deck and any subdecks it may contain, but you can select any deck from your collection by typing its name in the text box at the top of the screen or (from Anki 2.1.61), by using the deck selector at the bottom.

Collection

If you select this checkbox, statistics will be shown for your entire collection. You can also display graphs for arbitrary searches by adding filters in the search box at the top (2.1.28+).

History

By default, Anki shows you statistics for the last 12 months. You can change this to all history scope or deck life scope at the top. (The "today" section at the top remains of course unaffected by this selection.)

More

• Clicking on "Save PDF" at the bottom will save a PDF document of the statistics to a file on your desktop to make it easy to share your statistics with others.

• When you delete notes, their review history is maintained in Anki. It will not be included when looking at statistics for a specific deck (as Anki has no way of knowing which deck the deleted cards belonged to), but will be included when you look at statistics for the whole collection.

• Anki 2.1.28+ introduced redesigned graphs. The old graphs are still accessible with a Shift-click on the Stats button.

Today

At the top of the statistics window is a brief list of textual statistics about the reviews that you have completed today. A “review” in this context is 'one answering of a card', so a card might count as multiple reviews if it needed to be seen multiple times, and a learning card answered also counts as a “review.” A couple of the stats whose meaning may not be immediately obvious:

Again Count
This is the number of reviews that you have failed (i.e., pressed Again on). The correct percentage listed afterwards is the number of cards you did 'not' fail divided by the total number of cards you studied.

Learn, Review, Relearn, Filtered
The number of reviews that were learning cards, review cards, relearning cards, or studied in a filtered deck when not due.

The stats for the current day are not a good overall indicator of your learning progress; everyone has bad days and good days, and seeing that you got a lower percentage correct on a particular day should not be cause for concern. The remainder of the stats, which take longer periods of time into account, will give more useful information if you wish to try to change your study habits or scheduling settings based on your performance.

The “today” statistics are unaffected by the time period selected at the bottom of the window.

The Graphs

Future Due
This graph shows an estimated number of reviews that will be due on a given day in the future if you learn no new cards and fail no cards. The bars and the left axis show the number of cards due on each day if you study all cards each day, while the line and the right axis show the number of cards due on that day if you don’t study at all until then. Note that the forecast graph does not count reviews that are currently overdue, so if you have a large backlog, the overdue cards will not be displayed.

Daily load is an estimate of the average number of cards to be reviewed daily. If you don't have a backlog, daily load should be approximately equal to your number of due cards.

Calendar This graph shows past card review activity. Hovering the mouse over a specific item allows you to view the number of revisions made that day. Click on a day of the week to make that the starting day.

Reviews
This graph counts the number of card reviews you have done. The bars may correspond to days, weeks, or months, depending on the time period you’ve selected at the bottom of the screen. The differently colored blocks show how many of the cards you answered on each day were mature, young, relearning, or learning cards. There is also a separate group for cards answered in a filtered/cram deck while they were not due. The line and the right axis shows the cumulative total for each type of review as time progresses across the graph (so at 0 days, it would display the number for the entire time period displayed on the graph).

Card Counts
This pie chart shows what percentage of your deck or collection consists of mature, unseen, young/learn, and suspended cards. If you wish to calculate a more precise percentage, the key shows the exact number of cards in each section, and the total number of cards is displayed to the side.

Review Time
This graph works exactly like Review Count, except that it deals with the amount of time you spent on each card rather than the number of cards answered.

Review Intervals
This graph displays the number of cards that have a given interval (the delay between two reviews). The line and the right axis tell you what percentage of your cards have an interval of less than or equal to the time below that point. The time scope has a different effect on this graph than other graphs: rather than changing which cards or period of studying is included, it limits how far out the intervals are displayed to (so 14-month intervals are not displayed at all on a 1-year graph).

Card Ease
This graph shows the number of cards that have a specific ease factor. Average ease of the selected deck / collection is also displayed here.

Card Stability
Only shown if FSRS is enabled. Stability is defined as the amount of time required for the probability of recall to decrease from 100% to 90%.

Card Difficulty
Only shown if FSRS is enabled. Difficulty determines how quickly a card's interval grows after each review.

Card Retrievability
Only shown if FSRS is enabled. "Retrievability" is synonymous with "probability of recall".

Estimated total knowledge is the total number of cards you are likely to currently remember, calculated by multiplying average retrievability by the number of cards that have been reviewed at least once.

Hourly Breakdown
This graph shows what percentage of total reviews you have passed (i.e., not pressed Again on) during given hours. The larger, darker bars and left axis show the success rate; the thinner, lighter bars and right axis show the number of reviews you’ve made at that hour (so you know how significant the results are).

Answer Buttons
This graph shows how many times you’ve chosen the Again, Hard, Good, or Easy button while studying learning/new, young, and mature cards. Anki also displays the percentage of correct reviews for each type of card.

Manual Analysis

If you’re interested in getting information from your statistics other than what Anki provides, it is possible to access the data directly. Because of the complexity involved, this is not something we can provide any support for.

One option is to write an add-on that adds another graph or more details to the statistics window. There are several add-ons of this sort on AnkiWeb already, which you can look at to get an idea of how it works.

A more powerful and more complex option is to extract the review log information directly from Anki’s database and analyze it in an external program. Anki uses a database format called SQLite. There are many tools available for working with SQLite databases; one of the easiest to start with is called SQLite Browser, which will allow you to look around the database as well as export a CSV version of tables for import into another program.

The most important table for statistics is the 'revlog' table, which stores an entry for each review that you conduct. The columns are as follows:

id
The time at which the review was conducted, as the number of milliseconds that had passed since midnight UTC on January 1, 1970. (This is sometimes known as 'Unix epoch time', especially when in straight seconds instead of milliseconds.)

cid
The ID of the card that was reviewed. You can look up this value in the id field of the 'cards' table to get more information about the card, although note that the card could have changed between when the revlog entry was recorded and when you are looking it up. It is also the millisecond timestamp of the card’s creation time.

usn
This column is used to keep track of the sync state of reviews and provides no useful information for analysis.

ease
Which button you pressed at the end of the review (1 for Again, 4 for Easy).

ivl
The new interval that the card was pushed to after the review. Positive values are in days; negative values are in seconds (for learning cards).

lastIvl
The interval the card had before the review. Cards introduced for the first time have a last interval equal to the Again delay.

factor
The new ease factor of the card in permille (parts per thousand). If the ease factor is 2500, the card’s interval will be multiplied by 2.5 the next time you press Good.

time
The amount of time (in milliseconds) you spent on the question and answer sides of the card before selecting an ease button.

type
This is 0 for learning cards, 1 for review cards, 2 for relearning cards, and 3 for early "cram" cards (cards being studied in a filtered deck when they are not due).

Media

Anki stores the sounds and images used in your notes in a folder next to the collection. For more on the folder location, please see the file locations section. When you add media within Anki, either by using the paperclip icon in the editor or by pasting it into a field, Anki will copy it from its original location into the media folder. This makes it easy to back up your collection’s media or move it to another computer.

If your media filenames contain spaces or other special characters such as percentage signs, the way the filenames appear in the HTML editor will differ from the way the filenames appear on disk. For example, a file called hello 100%.jpg will appear as hello%20100%25.jpg in the HTML editor. Internally, Anki still uses the original filenames, so if you would like to search for the file or modify the filename with Find&Replace, you will need to use the name as it appears on disk, not as it appears in the HTML editor. Exporting to a text file is another way to see the underlying representation.

Checking Media

You can use the Tools>Check Media menu option to scan your notes and media folder. It will generate a report of files in the media folder that are not used by any notes, and media referenced in notes but missing from your media folder. It also allows you:

• To delete unused media files.
• To tag notes that refer to missing media files.
• To empty your trash folder.
• To restore the deleted files back to your media folder.

This tool does not scan question or answer templates, which is why you can’t place media references to fields in the template. If you need a static image or sound on every card, name it with a leading _ (e.g., _dog.jpg) to tell Anki to ignore it when checking for media. If you delete media using the unused media check, Anki will move it into your operating system’s trash folder, so you can recover if you accidentally delete media that shouldn’t have been deleted.

Manually Adding Media

When you add media via Anki's interface, Anki takes care of ensuring the filenames are encoded in a way that should work across different devices, removing characters that won't work on certain operating systems, and truncating very long filenames.

If you manually add files to your media folder, you should use Tools>Check Media afterwards, to ensure the filenames are encoded correctly. If you skip this step, any filenames that are not compatible will be skipped when syncing.

Supported Formats

Anki uses a program called mpv (and mplayer as a fallback) in order to support sounds and videos. A wide variety of file formats are supported, but not all of these formats will work on AnkiWeb and the mobile clients. MP3 audio and MP4 video seems to be the most universally supported.

Math and Symbols

• MathJax
• LaTeX
  • Security Warning
  • Assumed Knowledge
  • Web/Mobile
  • Example
  • Packages
  • Template Conflicts
  • Cloze Conflicts
  • Unsafe Commands

MathJax

MathJax is a modern, browser-based typesetting system, useful for mathematical and chemical equations. It does not require the installation of any extra software, so it is easy to use, and it is recommended for most users.

MathJax is supported out of the box on Anki 2.1+, AnkiMobile, and AnkiDroid 2.9+.

To try it out:

1. Type the following in a field:

   \sqrt{x}
   

2. Select the text you just typed.

3. Click the rightmost button in the editor, and choose "MathJax inline" from the menu. Anki will change the text so it reads:

   \(\sqrt{x}\)
   

4. If you click the Cards… button, you’ll see a preview of how the equation will appear when the card is reviewed.

Anki’s MathJax support expects content in TeX format. If you’re not familiar with TeX formatting, please see this cheatsheet. Please note that point 2 does not apply in Anki - Anki uses \( and \) for inline equations, and \[ and \] for display equations.

If you want to use newlines in a MathJax expression, please use Shift+Enter instead of just Enter, as a normal newline will prevent MathJax from working correctly.

Anki includes built in support for mhchem for rendering chemical equations. Please see the 'chemical equations' section and the following sections for more information: https://mhchem.github.io/MathJax-mhchem/

It is possible to customize some settings.

LaTeX

LaTeX is a powerful typesetting system, useful for entering mathematical formulas, chemical formulas, musical notation and so on. Anki provides some support for LaTeX, allowing you to enter LaTeX code in your notes. When you review a card, Anki will call LaTeX and display the generated image instead.

LaTeX is more work to set up, and images can only be generated with the computer version of Anki - though once generated, the images can be displayed by mobile clients. Because of the extra complexity LaTeX brings, it is only recommended for users that need more features than MathJax provides.

Security Warning

LaTeX code can contain malicious commands that can read or write non-Anki data on your computer. For this reason, recent Anki versions will refuse to generate LaTeX images by default.

If you wish to use LaTeX on your own cards, you will need to enable the 'Generate LaTeX images' option in the preferences screen.

We strongly recommend you do not enable this option if you use shared decks, or think you will import shared decks in the future, as you are potentially giving any shared deck author access to your computer.

You do not need to enable this option for shared decks. If a shared deck author has correctly generated all the images prior to them sharing the deck, the images should already be available.

Assumed Knowledge

Anki’s LaTeX support is not turn-key: it is assumed that you know how to use LaTeX already, and that you have it installed. If you have no experience with LaTeX, please consult one of the many guides available on the internet. If you are having trouble with markup, please ask on a LaTeX forum.

To install LaTeX, on Windows use MiKTeX; on macOS use MacTeX, and on Linux use your distro’s package manager. Dvipng must also be installed.

On Windows, go to Settings in MikTeX’s maintenance window, and make sure "Install missing packages on the fly" is set to "Always", not to "Ask me first". If you continue to have difficulties, one user reported that running Anki as an administrator until all the packages were fetched helped.

On macOS, LaTeX has only been tested with MacTeX and BasicTeX. If you use BasicTeX, you need to install dvipng separately, with the following command:

sudo tlmgr update --self; sudo tlmgr install dvipng

The command may not be on the path, so you may need to provide the full path, e.g /usr/local/texlive/2014basic/bin/x86_64-darwin/tlmgr.

If you are not using the above LaTeX packages, you will need to use the edit LaTeX add-on to specify the full path to latex and dvipng.

Web/Mobile

When you review a card with LaTeX on it, Anki will generate an image for that LaTeX and place the image in your collection’s media folder for future use. The web & mobile clients will display these images if they already exist, but can not generate the images on their own.

To avoid having to review all your cards at least once before you can study on the other clients, Anki can generate the images in bulk for you. To generate all the images, please go to Tools>Check Media. After that, syncing should upload the generated media to AnkiWeb and the other clients.

Example

The most general way to input LaTeX content is to surround it with [latex][/latex] tags. There’s a shortcut button for this documented in the editor section.

[latex] tags must be used inside a field - placing them in the card template will cause problems.

For example, entering the following on the front of an Anki flashcard:

Does [latex]\begin{math}\sum_{k = 1}^{\infty}\frac{1}{k}\end{math}[/latex] converge?

will produce this when the flashcard is viewed:

The formula in the example above is called a 'text formula', because it is displayed right within the non-mathematical text. In contrast, the following example shows a 'displayed formula':

Does the sum below converge?

[latex]\begin{displaymath}\sum_{k = 1}^{\infty}\frac{1}{k}\end{displaymath}[/latex]

'Text formulas' and 'display formulas' are the most common type of LaTeX expressions, so Anki provides abbreviated versions of them. Expressions of the form:

[latex]\begin{math}...\end{math}[/latex]

can be shortened to

[$]...[/$]

and expressions of the form

[latex]\begin{displaymath}...\end{displaymath}[/latex]

can be shortened to

[$$]...[/$$]

For example, the two LaTeX snippets shown before are equivalent to

Does [$]\sum_{k = 1}^{\infty}\frac{1}{k}[/$] converge?

and

Does the sum below converge?

[$$]\sum_{k = 1}^{\infty}\frac{1}{k}[/$$]

respectively.

Packages

Anki allows you to customize the LaTeX preamble so you can import custom packages for chemistry, music and so on. For example, imagine you find an example file for chemtex on the internet:

\documentclass[a4paper,12pt]{report}
\usepackage{chemtex}
\begin{document}

\initial
\begin{figure}[h]\centering
\parbox{.3\textwidth}{\ethene{H}{H$_3$C}{CH$_3$}{Br}}
\hfil
\parbox{.3\textwidth}{\cbranch{H}{S}{H}{S}{C}{S}{}{S}{H}
  \xi=-200 \cright{}{Q}{C}{D}{O}{S}{OH}}
\hfil
\parbox{.3\textwidth}{\hetisix{Q}{Q}{Q}{Q}{Q}{Q}{O}{Q}{O}
  \xi=-171 \fuseup{Q}{Q}{Q}{Q}{D}{Q}{D}{Q}{D}}
\caption{Chemie mit {\tt CHEMTEX}\label{a1}}
\end{figure}

\end{document}

Firstly, follow the documentation of the package and MiKTeX/MacTeX in order to install the package. To check the package is working, you’ll want to put code like the above into a .latex file and test if you can compile it from the command line. Once you’ve confirmed that the package is available and working, we can integrate it with Anki.

To use the package with Anki, click "Add" in the main window, then click the note type selection button. Click the "Manage" button, then select the note type you plan to use and click "Options". The LaTeX header and footer are shown. The header will look something like:

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\special{papersize=3in,5in}
\usepackage{amssymb,amsmath}
\pagestyle{empty}
\setlength{\parindent}{0in}
\begin{document}

To use chemtex, you’d add the usepackage line in the earlier example, so it looks like:

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\special{papersize=3in,5in}
\usepackage{amssymb,amsmath}
\usepackage{chemtex}
\pagestyle{empty}
\setlength{\parindent}{0in}
\begin{document}

After that, you should be able to include lines like the following in your Anki cards:

[latex]\ethene{H}{H$_3$C}{CH$_3$}{Br}[/latex]

Template Conflicts

As of Anki 2.1.20 / AnkiMobile 2.0.56 / AnkiDroid 2.13, this workaround is no longer required, as {{field}} text inside fields no longer causes problems. If you need to support older versions and want to keep using this syntax, please make sure you place the {{=<% %>=}} string at the very top of your front and back template, as recent Anki versions will not recognize it anywhere but the start.

For older versions:

It’s not uncommon for {{ and }} to pop up in LaTeX code when writing mathematical equations. To ensure that your LaTeX equations don’t conflict with Anki’s field replacements, it’s possible to change the separator to something else.

For example, if you have a template:

{{latex field}}

Changing it to the following will make it unlikely that the LaTeX will conflict:

{{=<% %>=}}
<%latex field%>

Cloze Conflicts

Cloze deletions are terminated with }}, which can conflict with a }} appearing in your LaTeX. To prevent LaTeX from being interpreted as a closing cloze marker, you can put a space between any double closing braces that do not indicate the end of the cloze, so

{{c1::[$]\frac{foo}{\frac{bar}{baz}}[/$] blah blah blah.}}

will not work, but

{{c1::[$]\frac{foo}{\frac{bar}{baz} }[/$] blah blah blah.}}

will (and LaTeX ignores spaces in math mode, so your equation will render the same). If you want to avoid adding the extra space into the rendered text (for example, when you are making Cloze cards for learning programming languages), another option is to use a HTML comment when editing the card in HTML mode:

{{c1::[$]\frac{foo}{\frac{bar}{baz}<!-- -->}[/$] blah blah blah.}}

You may use either workaround if you need to use the :: character sequence within the Cloze-deleted text. The first card generated for the following note text will read [type] in C++ is a type-safe union:

{{c1::std:<!-- -->:variant::~type~}} in C++ is a {{c2::type-safe union}}

Unsafe Commands

Anki prohibits certain commands like \input or \def from being used on cards or in templates, because allowing them could allow malicious shared decks to damage your system. (To be on the safe side, these commands are prohibited even in comments, so if you’re getting this error but don’t think you’ve used one, please double-check any comments you have in your headers, templates, and cards.) If you need to use these commands, please add them to a system package and import that package as described in the previous section.

Leeches

• Editing
• Deleting
• Waiting

Leeches are cards that you keep forgetting. Because they require so many reviews, they take up a lot more of your time, compared to other cards.

Anki can help you identify leeches. Each time a review card 'lapses' (is failed while it is in review mode), a counter increases. When this counter reaches 8, Anki tags the note as a leech and suspends the card. The threshold, and whether to suspend or not, can be adjusted in the deck options.

If you keep failing that card, Anki will continue to alert you about the leech periodically. These warnings occur at half the initial leech threshold. For example, if you set the warning at 8 lapses, future warnings will happen every 4 lapses (at 12, 16, and so on).

Once a leech is found, there are several ways to handle it.

Editing

The most efficient method to deal with leeches is to change how the information is presented. Maybe your cards have too much information, or you’re trying to memorize something without fully understanding it. Often, it helps to follow the 20 rules of formulating knowledge, proposed by Dr Piotr Wozniak, the creator of SuperMemo. Some cards can benefit from a mnemonic. Even some well-written cards may need a boost in coherence, e.g. by adding cards for related concepts. However, it takes a lot of experience to know how to formulate the material properly, break it down into smallest possible components, and use mnemonic techniques.

Deleting

If the material you’re struggling with isn't important enough to justify the time spent, you can simply delete the card. By selectively deleting difficult and obscure items, you can spend more time learning other material, making studying more enjoyable. If you think the card might be useful for future reference, you can leave it suspended.

Waiting

Some leeches are caused by 'interference'. For example, an English learner may have recently learnt the words "disappoint" and "disappear". As they look similar, the learner may find themselves confusing the two when trying to answer. In such situations, it’s often helpful to concentrate on one idea at a time. Once that idea is firmly ingrained in your mind, you can then start learning the other idea. So, in these situations, you might want to leave one of the words suspended until you have learnt the other one well, and then unsuspend it.

For a more detailed discussion, you can refer to the article "Dealing with Leeches", written by Soren Bjornstad.

Add-ons

Anki's capabilities can be extended with add-ons. Add-ons can provide features like extra support for specific languages, extra control over scheduling, and so on.

To browse the list of available add-ons, select Tools → Add-ons, then click on Get Add-ons. Alternatively, open ankiweb.net/shared/addons in a web browser.

If you have downloaded an add-on that is not working properly, or if you accidentally made a mistake when editing an add-on, you can use the "Delete" option in the menu to remove it.

Add-ons use and modify arbitrary parts of Anki’s codebase, so in some cases, updating Anki can break the compatibility with older add-ons. If one of your add-ons stops working after updating Anki, please consider reporting the issue to the add-on author. If you rely on this add-on, you will need to keep using an older Anki version until the add-on gets an update.

There is a "Contact Author" button on most add-ons pages on AnkiWeb, and many authors include their email address in the add-on, so if you need to get in touch with the author, editing the add-on and looking at the top of the file may help.

To learn how to write your own add-ons, please see the add-on writing guide.

Troubleshooting

If you encounter a problem with Anki, please try the following steps in order:

1. Restart Anki

Please close Anki, then start it again.

If you are unable to close Anki because of an error message, you can either terminate Anki using your task manager, or restart your computer. Anki saves periodically, so you should not lose more than a few minutes of work in most circumstances.

If the problem does not occur again, you can skip the following steps.

2. Check add-ons

Please close Anki, then open it in safe mode by holding down the Shift key while starting Anki. Keep holding Shift down until the on-screen message informs you that Anki has started in safe mode.

If the problem goes away, that indicates an add-on is causing the problem. Remove any add-ons you don't need, and disable half of the others. If the problem continues, try the other half. Repeat the process until you've figured out which add-on is causing the problem. Then please report the issue to the add-on author, using the Copy Debug Info button, and pasting that into the report.

3. Check your Anki version

You can find the version you're using in the Help>About or Anki>About menu. If the version you're using is not the latest version published on https://apps.ankiweb.net, please close Anki, install the latest version, and then start Anki again to see if the problem has gone away.

If you're using Linux, please make sure you can reproduce the error using the packaged version on the Anki website, as distros often distribute broken versions.

4. Check your database

After restarting Anki, please try the Tools>Check Database menu item to make sure your collection doesn't have any problems.

5. Restart your computer

Sometimes restarting your computer may help.

6. Change the Video Driver

Crashes and display issues can be caused by the video driver. Changing to a different video driver in the preferences screen or via the gldriver file may help. Make sure you try all three options and restart Anki after each change.

• Windows
• Mac
• Linux

7. Reset window sizes

Sometimes pressing 'reset window sizes' button in the preferences screen immediately after starting Anki will help.

8. If the problem remains

If you're confirmed you are using the latest Anki version, and are still receiving errors when starting Anki while holding down the shift key, please report the problem, including the next error you receive in your post.

Self-Hosted Sync Server

Advanced users who cannot or do not wish to use AnkiWeb can use a self-hosted sync server instead.

Things to be aware of:

• This is an advanced feature, targeted at users who are comfortable with networking and the command line. If you use this, the expectation is you can resolve any setup/network/firewall issues you run into yourself, and use of this is entirely at your own risk.
• Newer clients may depend on changes to the sync protocol, so syncing may stop working if you update your Anki clients without also updating the server.
• Third-party sync servers also exist. No testing is done against them, and they tend to take time to catch up when the sync protocol changes, so they are not recommended.
• The messages inside Anki will use the term 'AnkiWeb' even if a custom server has been configured, (e.g "Cannot connect to AnkiWeb" when your server is down).

Installing/Running

There are various ways you can install and run the server. You can use either:

• the sync server bundled with the desktop version of Anki
• a separate minimal sync server that doesn't include Anki's GUI dependencies. Python and Rust implementations are available.

From a Packaged Build

This uses the sync server built into the desktop version of Anki as of version 2.1.57+.

On Windows in a cmd.exe session:

set SYNC_USER1=user:pass
"\Program Files\anki\anki.exe" --syncserver

Or MacOS, in Terminal.app:

SYNC_USER1=user:pass /Applications/Anki.app/Contents/MacOS/anki --syncserver

Or Linux:

SYNC_USER1=user:pass anki --syncserver

With Pip

To avoid downloading desktop Anki's GUI dependencies, you can run a standalone Anki sync server using a Python package downloaded from PyPI instead. Make sure you have Python 3.9+ installed.

python3 -m venv ~/syncserver
~/syncserver/bin/pip install anki
SYNC_USER1=user:pass ~/syncserver/bin/python -m anki.syncserver

With Cargo

From Anki 2.1.66+, you can alternatively build a Rust implementation of the standalone sync server using the below command. Make sure you have Rustup installed.

cargo install --git https://github.com/ankitects/anki.git --tag 2.1.66 anki-sync-server

Replace 2.1.66 with whatever the latest Anki version is.

Protobuf (protoc) will need to be installed.

After building, you can run it with:

SYNC_USER1=user:pass anki-sync-server

From a source checkout

If you've cloned the Anki repo from GitHub, you can install from there:

./ninja extract:protoc
cargo install --path rslib/sync

Multiple Users

SYNC_USER1 declares the first user and password, and must be set. You can optionally declare SYNC_USER2, SYNC_USER3 and so on, if you wish to set up multiple accounts.

Hashed Passwords

Advanced users may wish to use hashed passwords instead of plain text passwords. If you wish to do this, you'll need to use a separate tool (such as this one) to generate a password hash. You can then tell the server to expect hashed passwords by setting the env var PASSWORDS_HASHED to 1 (or any other value).

When hashed passwords are used, SYNC_USER variables are expected to be in username:password_hash format, where password_hash is a hash of the password in the PHC Format.

Storage Location

The server needs to store a copy of your collection and media in a folder. By default it is ~/.syncserver; you can change this by defining a SYNC_BASE environmental variable. This must not be the same location as your normal Anki data folder, as the server and client must store separate copies.

Public Access

The server listens on an unencrypted HTTP connection, so it's not a good idea to expose it directly to the internet. You'll want to either restrict usage to your local network, or place some form of encryption in front of the server, such as a VPN (Tailscale is apparently easy), or a HTTPS reverse proxy.

You can define SYNC_HOST and SYNC_PORT to change the host and port that the server binds to.

Client Setup

You'll need to determine your computer's network IP address, and then point each of your Anki clients to the address, e.g something like http://192.168.1.200:8080/. The URL can be configured in the preferences.

If you're using AnkiMobile and are unable to connect to a server on your local network, please go into the iOS settings, locate Anki near the bottom, and toggle "Allow Anki to access local network" off and then on again.

Older desktop clients required you to define SYNC_ENDPOINT and SYNC_ENDPOINT_MEDIA. If using an older client, you'd put it as e.g. http://192.168.1.200:8080/sync/ and http://192.168.1.200:8080/msync/ respectively. AnkiDroid clients before 2.16 require separate configuration for the two endpoints.

Reverse Proxies

If using a reverse proxy to provide HTTPS access (e.g. nginx), and binding to a subpath (e.g. http://example.com/custom/ -> http://localhost:8080/), you must make sure to including a trailing slash when configuring Anki. If you put http://example.com/custom instead, it will not work.

On iOS, TLS 1.3 is not supported, so your reverse proxy will need to have TLS 1.2 enabled, or you'll get an "error code -9836".

Large Requests

The standard AnkiWeb limit on uploads is applied by default. You can optionally set MAX_SYNC_PAYLOAD_MEGS to something greater than 100 if you wish to increase the limit. Bear in mind that if you're using a reverse proxy, you may need to adjust the limit there as well.

Contributing Changes

Because this server is bundled with Anki, simplicity is a design goal - it is targeted at individual/family use, and PRs that add things like a REST API or external databases are unlikely to be accepted at this time. If in doubt, please reach out before starting work on a PR.

If you're looking for an existing API solution, the AnkiConnect add-on may meet your needs.

Miscellanea

• Menu Shortcuts
• Debug Console

Menu Shortcuts

On Windows/Linux you can hold down the Alt key and press a highlighted letter to activate a particular menu.

Although macOS doesn’t support this feature, it does allow you instead to assign shortcuts to specific menu items. Please see https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/mac-help/mchlp2271/mac for more information.

Debug Console

Sometimes you may be asked to use the debug console to change a setting or check something. Unless asked to enter text in the "debug console", you will probably not need this. Advanced users may like to read more about it in the add-on writing guide.

When asked to enter text into the "debug console", please start Anki, and in the main window, press

Ctrl+Shift+;

(the control key, shift key, and semi-colon key at the same time)

On a Mac, press

Command+Shift+;

(the command key, shift key, and semi-colon key at the same time)

On some non-English keyboards, you may need to press : or + instead of ;.

In the window that has popped up, please paste the text you were asked to paste in the top section. When you’ve done so, please press Ctrl+Return (Command+Return on a Mac), and some text should appear in the bottom section. If you’ve been asked to paste the resulting output, please copy it from the bottom area, and paste it back to the support person.

If you press Ctrl+Shift+Return instead of just Ctrl+Return, Anki will try to print the result rather than doing what you asked it to. If you are getting unexpected errors, please make sure you’re not holding down the Shift key.

Contributing

• Sharing Decks Publicly
• Sharing Decks Privately
• Sharing Add-ons
• Translating Anki
• Contributing Code

Sharing Decks Publicly

To share decks with the general public, synchronize them with AnkiWeb, then log into AnkiWeb and click on "Share" from the menu next to the deck you wish to share.

If you shared a deck previously (including with previous versions of Anki), you can update it by clicking "Share" as above. Updating a shared deck will not reset the download counts or ratings. You can delete a shared deck that you have uploaded using the Delete button on the shared deck's page.

When updating a deck, AnkiWeb expects the deck to be at the same location as before. If you shared a deck when it was called "Korean Verbs" for example, and then renamed it to "Korean::Korean Verbs", resharing will not be able to update the existing copy. If you have forgotten the original name, you can guess it by downloading the deck on AnkiWeb and importing it (File > Import) in a new profile (File > Switch profile > Add). Then you can copy the exact name of the deck when it was first shared. If this doesn't work, please contact support.

When you update a shared deck, users who downloaded the deck previously will not automatically receive updates. If they download the deck again and re-import it, newly added material will be imported without altering their existing study progress, provided neither you nor the user has altered the note type since the first import.

Sharing Decks Privately

If you’d like to share decks with a limited group of people (such as a study group or class) rather than the general public, you can do so by sharing them outside of AnkiWeb.

To share a deck privately, go to the File menu and choose Export. Select a single deck (not "All Decks"), and turn off "include scheduling information". This will produce an .apkg file which you can share with others.

You can share the .apkg file by emailing it to people, placing it on a website or shared folder, or using a free file sharing service like Dropbox or Google Drive and sending people a link.

Both the computer version and mobile clients make it easy to import from an apkg file simply by clicking or tapping on it. AnkiWeb does not have the ability to import apkg files however, so the recipients of your deck will need to have the computer version or Anki on their mobile device.

When a user imports an .apkg file, cards that already exist in their collection will be ignored and any new cards will be added. As long as they use the same note type, modified cards will also be updated. To prevent data loss, cards that have been deleted in the new apkg file will not be deleted in the user’s collection, so if you need to delete cards from users' decks for whatever reason, you will need to contact them about it.

Sharing Add-ons

Please see https://addon-docs.ankiweb.net/sharing.html

Translating Anki

Please see https://translating.ankiweb.net

Contributing Code

Anki's source code is available at https://github.com/ankitects/anki

Before contributing, please see contributing.md.

Frequently Asked Questions

Please see https://faqs.ankiweb.net

Resources

Writings

• SuperMemo Guru: Piotr Wozniak's writings about spaced repetition and memory.

• Augmenting Long-term Cognition: Michael Nielsen's article about long term memory and how he uses Anki. He also provides a condensed version as a series of tweets.

• Control-Alt-Backspace: Writings about memory, SRS and how to use Anki effectively from Soren Bjornstad's blog.

• Spaced Repetition Algorithm: A Three‐Day Journey from Novice to Expert: An article from Jarrett Ye about spaced repetition algorithms. Jarrett Ye is the creator of FSRS, the algorithm Anki uses.

• Expertium's Blog: Articles related to spaced repetition and FSRS, from one of the contributors to FSRS.

Guides

• Anki Mastery Course: A paid-for guide focusing on Anki use in medical schools.