Searching

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 (&amp; for &, &lt; for <, and &gt; for >). For example, searching &amp;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.