Hello, I’ve got all my decks arranged underneath a “master” deck, itself containing no cards, which I then use to do all my studying. Generally there are two modes I like to use when pulling new cards from the subdecks underneath: in-order and completely random. Unfortunately, unless I’ve missed something, varying new-card-gather-order across subdecks like this is not supported. I’ve looked into the code and it seems feasible, albeit tricky, to add this, so I have two questions.
Would this be trivial for someone else to implement? If so, and if they have the inclination, I’d rather leave it to them.
If not, would a pull request likely be accepted if I play around and get something working?
Regardless, thanks for everyone’s time and effort spent working on this project; it’s been an incredibly useful tool.
I think the current solution for this is to use the Reposition feature in the card browser to shuffle some decks, and then use the Deck gather order option.
The caveat is that this only works when you have your new card limits structured “bottom-up”, such that the top deck’s limit is 9999 or at least always larger than what the subdecks can provide. If Anki can just fill the master deck’s limit with the topmost deck’s cards, it will.
I do think, though, that gather order could be more powerful / intuitive. When I first saw that option, I thought it was recursive. For example, I expected that “Ascending position” would pull as much as it can from the first subdeck, using that deck’s gather order setting, and then move on to the second, etc. And that “Random cards” would roughly uniformly pick the top cards from each deck, using their respective card orders. Instead, it seems that Anki ignores subdeck structure entirely.
I’m not sure how to solve this. Maybe adding separate options for “Defer to subdecks in random order” and “Defer to subdecks in lexical order” would make sense. Then again, I’m sure the developers have lots of more important stuff to do in building this amazing app!
Funny, I was just looking for a way to do this exact thing. Fortunately in my case it’s a small deck that’s unlikely to expand, so the method suggested by aug is a good fit for me.
I will add a tentative vote that the “Defer to” options would be nice to have, but the situation isn’t particularly pressing for me.