Anki 2.1.45 Alpha

The add-on is referencing this removed setting:

So it has to be updated, but the fix should be as trivial as deleting the line self.form.sticky.setParent(None).

@Rumo the current line is already
self.form.sticky.setParent(None). It’s for a new dialog (not the one you referenced) but it does remove that button in the new dialog. Haven’t had any issues till this version

The add-on is repurposing the native Anki dialogue from cqg’s screenshot. The error is thrown because it’s trying to remove a button that doesn’t exist anymore.
Not sure what you mean by “the current line is already self.form.sticky.setParent(None).” It has to be removed.

When I remove it I get this funky formatting now:

I don’t understand why it was there in the first place… but if I remove that line and go to 2.1.44, then I do get a “remember last input when adding” button. When I then view it on 2.1.45, I get the image above. Simple fix perhaps. If that button isn’t going to exist anymore, then do I just need to have someone update the special fields add-on? (seems like it may just be a cosmetic thing)

Yes, it’s only cosmetics. The problem is that the add-on relies on an existing form in Anki and when this form changes, the dialogue’s layout breaks.
The author probably had their reason to do it this way, but if the add-on was shipped with its own form, it wouldn’t break as easily.

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I will make a case here for marked at the top of the sidebar. That’s something that I always wanted to say. Let’s think through the eyes of the new user:

  • he makes his first basic notes: Oh, I can tag cards (at this point, he still doesn’t know the difference between notes and cards).

  • he starts studying: Oh, I can also flag and star each card too. So, I can mark each card in 3 different ways. Nice.

  • he makes his first visit to the browser: I see my flagged cards. I see my tagged cards. But, where is that pretty little star?
    (true story)

So, my suggestion is that there should be a separate category, in the top of the sidebar, for marked cards, with a Star by the side of it. When people put a Star in the card, they expect to find a Star in the browser.

Flags are way less used (I think), but they are there, at the top, with actual little colorful flags.

BR,

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+1 on that!

I can only repeat what I have proposed a while ago:

It always felt wrong to see marked and leech somewhere within the normal tags.

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And it gets worse when the person is using Anki in a language in which “Mark Note” (as seen when marking the card) translates to something that doesn’t ressamble the word “marked”. So the italian user:

-when studying: Contrassegna nota (Mark note)
-wants to find his “Contrassegna nota” (or something similar) in the browser; finds the tag “marked”: Ma chi è Mark (But, who is Mark)?

Italian fellows, please confirm.
The same happens in other languages.

Making ‘marked’ a default saved search will mean it’s the first thing seen by a user, and I don’t really think it is used enough to justify such prominent placement. When flags were introduced, they were originally intended to replace marking completely, and while marking has remained, most users should find flags cover their use cases.

Making it into a saved search also means it won’t be able to change when the interface language is adjusted.

Placing it and leech at the top of Tags means everyone is forced to see them even if they don’t use them, and some people have already complained about the presence of Untagged. Maybe one alternative would be to change “Untagged” to “Builtin”, and nest Untagged along with Leech and Marked there, as children. Would that work for people?

Perhaps just add a “card properties” beneath tags for less used things? I have always thought mixing leech and marked in with tags was strange as it feels like a flag or something controlled by anki and the tags feel more like user-added. I will also add that most users I talk with are still using marked and leech. I frequently get questions about those functions (at least 4-5x/wk)

The biggest complaint I hear from new users is that they can’t find things or that anki isn’t user friendly (I’m talking 100s of complaints). That is why I continue to suggest making things more organized and available from within anki and not just the manual. I do recognize it means more maintenance for you so I’m not specific about where or how they are located, as long as it’s reasonably accessible.

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:+1: Sounds better than “Builtin” (easier to understand for non-native-speakers like me).
I’d put it right above “Tags” though, not beneath, because most of the time the hierarchy will be expanded.

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Marked and leech are tags, though, and not card properties. Moving them out of the tags section will only add to the confusion.
I’m not a fan of a subsection, either, because it would erroneously suggest a name like “Builtin::marked” and would require a lot of special casing. And what would happen to children of these tags?

As @dae has said, users complain about the predominance as well as about the inconspicuousness of the builtin items. This may suggest that the status quo is a reasonable compromise. :wink:
What about leaving the items where they are but making them more eye-catching with font styling or special icons? It might make a huge difference if the icon for “marked” was a star as in the reviewer. “Untagged” could have the tag icon but crossed out and I’m sure we could come up with appropriate icons for “Current deck” and “leech” as well.

Other than that, saved searches are definitely an underused feature, even by more experienced users (like myself). This discussion is an exemplary use case for them, but I don’t know how people could be nudged to make better use of them.

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I actually like this idea @rumo. Having a star next to marked and something else next to Untagged, leech, etc would be really clear

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Speaking of Sidebar
Should “edit tags” be apart of that as well?
image

What’s “edit tags” though? Is this part of an add-on?
Ctrl + 6 is the command for the new turquoise flag.

You can edit them directly in the sidebar. For batch edits you can use “Find and Replace”, which supports tag replacements now.

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that might have been an add-on
thought this was built-in into Anki :clown_face:

A post was split to a new topic: Anki 2.1.45 Beta

Something that I try to keep in mind is that what is intuitive to existing users may not be for new users, and vice versa. I wonder if the fact that you’re getting lots of questions about marked and leech is really a signal that these belong up the top, or whether it’s more that they used to be up the top, and that’s what users are used to. The messaging could be improved here - if the tooltips shown when marking or leeching a card were something like “Tagged note with ‘marked’” and “Tagged note with ‘leech’”, then it should be more obvious where to look to locate them.

That is not a bad goal in theory, but we also need to consider progressive disclosure so that the user is not overwhelmed with options, and figuring out where things should go and how they should be categorized is not always easy.

Yep, good point.

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I’m a new Anki user, I’ve just used it for three months (althought for many hours a day, that’s true) and 2.1.43 was the first version I used, so I don’t even know how “leech” and “marked” were displayed before.

I personally don’t see anything wrong with the way they are displayed in the browser; quite the contrary, the fact that “leech” and “marked” are shown as regular tags in the browser helped me to understand how those features actually work, and how I could use them.

Of course, just my personal point of view.

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