Anki 26.05 Beta 2

Hi,

A new beta is now available:

7 Likes

Hello, how are we meant to update with the new launcher ? I used the Check for Updates but only got prompted to download the anki-linux folder and never prompted to upgrade like it did before.

Is it intended behavior ?

UI Freezes on Secondary Display Disconnection (macOS)
Anki Version: 26.05b2 (975ab207)
OS/Hardware: macOS (Tahoe 26.3) - MacBook Air M1 (2020), 8GB RAM
Environment: Python 3.13.11 | Qt 6.11.0 | Chromium 140

Description: The Anki user interface freezes and stops updating visually when a secondary monitor is disconnected while the app is running in fullscreen mode on that external display.

Steps to Reproduce:

  1. Connect an external monitor (mine is HP 27f) and open Anki.
  2. Move Anki to the secondary display and enter Fullscreen mode.
  3. Go to the review screen and open any card.
  4. Disconnect the external monitor.
  5. Anki automatically moves to the primary display (MacBook Air) in fullscreen mode, but the UI completely freezes on the front of the card.

Expected Behavior: The UI should re-render correctly on the primary display and remain responsive to visual updates.

Actual Behavior: The UI is visually frozen on the card’s front side. However, the app still processes inputs in the background, e.g., pressing Spacebar gets anki to the back of the card (even though it doesn’t show it since the UI is frozen) and the card gets rated as “Good” when pressing again; the audio/shortcuts still work, but the screen does not update.

Terminal Logs:

Qt warning: Display requested for non-online display QCocoaScreen(0xc0d2bb780, "HP 27f", Offline, QRect(0,0 1920x1080), dpr=1, displayId=2, <NSScreen: 0xc07fb8b40>) Deferring to next runloop pass
JS error /_anki/legacyPageData?id=4825352464:16 Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read properties of null (reading 'innerHTML')
Qt warning: fromIccProfile: failed size sanity 1

Video:
Recording of the primary display; anki was already open in fullscreen mode on the secondary display, which I disconnected. Anki then moved to the primary display and the UI was frozen (as you can see from the timer in the lower right corner).

Also the UI updates upon swiping back and forth between full screen apps as shown.

I tested the upgrade path from 26.05b1 to 26.05b2 on macOS Tahoe 26.5. On Mac the process looks like:

  1. Tools > Check for Updates: indicated there was a new version available.
  2. Choosing to get the new version opened a dialog that showed the download progress.
  3. When the download was complete, Finder opened a .dmg file.
  4. This allowed me to install the new version of the Anki app in the usual Mac way (by dragging the Anki app icon into the Applications folder icon).

(The downloaded .dmg file didn’t appear in the Downloads folder and wasn’t findable using Spotlight Search. However, from manually searching around, I found that the file was in the ~/Library/Application Support/AnkiProgramFiles/updates directory.)


I tried to reproduce that intermittent crash I previously saw with 26.05b1, but no crash was seen.


I tried to reproduce the “UI Freezes on Secondary Display Disconnection” bug, but I don’t have a secondary monitor. So, I was not able to test the exact bug. Instead I tested to see if the bug could be seen using an Extended Display via Screen Mirroring instead. I was not able to reproduce the bug using this different method.

I used Screen Mirroring over Airplay to Extend to my Apple TV. I moved Anki app to the desktop/space on the extended display, and entered Fullscreen mode. This created an additional desktop/space on the extended display containing the fullscreen Anki app (as seen in Mission Control).

I opened a card in Anki, and then disconnected the extended display via Stop Extending. The desktop/space with the fullscreen Anki app automatically moved to my regular display (as seen in Mission Control). I then switched to the Anki desktop/space. The UI was not frozen on the front of the card. The Show Answer and Decks buttons worked normally.

1 Like

I am experiencing a display issue in the current beta (this also occurred in Beta 1). When the front of a card contains Arabic text, the text on the back of the card does not render correctly.
Example:
On latest stable release this is how it looks:


Where as on the beta it looks like (text is reversed):

With English in the front it works fine:

Here I am using the default Basic note type.

1 Like

Hi, this is due to a change at 4428. Newer versions of Anki stabilizes the direction of cards.

Previous versions of Anki (your stable release) would render as shown in the beta version if you change the UI language from English to Arabic (or vice versa). Newer versions of Anki makes the direction stable, regardless of the UI language. The direction of the card is the same as the direction of the first letter in the card (in the question field).

If you need the direction of the card to be LTR you can insert a dummy English letter at the beginning of the question field.

2 Likes

I’m on macOS. I got this prompt on beta 1, but it went away when I installed mpv via homebrew. Now the error has returned, despite the fact that mpv is installed. I can’t find any setting to tell Anki where mpv is installed, but I also feel like this wasn’t necessary at all in the most recent stable version? I figured I’d report since it seems there were some changes with mpv in this most recent beta.

1 Like

I don’t believe this solution is viable since it may affect searching for the card in the browser, and this currently affects multiple thousands of cards in my collection so would I have to manually update each one of them? It also won’t look pleasant when reviewing.

It is mentioned in 4428 :

It might produce unexpected results if the field contains a mix of languages with different directions and the user expects a different direction from the first “strong” character, but I assume this rare.

Why is this assumed to be rare? One could argue that changing your UI form Arabic to English (or vice-versa) is also rare.

It should not affect the card browser since it’s only a template change.

I believe you can add direction: ltr; to the .card class in the styling section to get the old behavior.

Generally though, avoid having RTL and LTR text on the same line at any cost!

2 Likes

Another way might be to hard-code left-to-right in the template for the field.

<span dir="ltr">{{Back}}</span>

I haven’t seen this on my Mac, with either 26.05b1 or 26.05b2. With the current 26.05b2, I see that some sort of mpv executable is installed by the Anki app as: /Applications/Anki.app/Contents/Resources/app_packages/anki_audio/mpv

2 Likes

It’s more unreasonable that a shared deck is rendered differently based on the UI language.

1 Like

I’ve also got mpv and lame located in that anki_audio folder :thinking:

I attempted running Anki from the terminal to get some logging and have some interesting output:

2026-05-31 08:51:53.738 Anki[61478:15905792] No Python NSLog handler found. stdout/stderr will not be captured.
2026-05-31 08:51:53.738 Anki[61478:15905792] To capture stdout/stderr, add 'std-nslog' to your app dependencies.
Starting Anki 26.05b2...
2026-05-31 08:51:54,678:INFO:aqt.mediasrv: Serving on http://127.0.0.1:55416
2026-05-31 08:51:54,848:WARNING:py.warnings: /Users/pjanak/Library/Application Support/Anki2/addons21/678316993/utils.py:42: SyntaxWarning: invalid escape sequence '\['
  stripped, _ = re.subn('\[[^\]]*\]', '', stripped)

Starting main loop...
dyld[61483]: Library not loaded: @executable_path/libs/libass.9.dylib
  Referenced from: <3CE90DE0-9F74-3FA6-9A8E-E692D5151560> /Applications/Anki.app/Contents/Resources/app_packages/anki_audio/mpv
  Reason: tried: '/Applications/Anki.app/Contents/Resources/app_packages/anki_audio/libs/libass.9.dylib' (no such file)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/Users/runner/work/anki/anki/out/installer/build/anki/macos/app/Anki.app/Contents/Resources/app_packages/aqt/sound.py", line 944, in setup_audio
  File "/Users/runner/work/anki/anki/out/installer/build/anki/macos/app/Anki.app/Contents/Resources/app_packages/aqt/sound.py", line 456, in __init__
  File "/Users/runner/work/anki/anki/out/installer/build/anki/macos/app/Anki.app/Contents/Resources/app_packages/aqt/mpv.py", line 466, in __init__
  File "/Users/runner/work/anki/anki/out/installer/build/anki/macos/app/Anki.app/Contents/Resources/app_packages/aqt/mpv.py", line 108, in __init__
  File "/Users/runner/work/anki/anki/out/installer/build/anki/macos/app/Anki.app/Contents/Resources/app_packages/aqt/mpv.py", line 218, in _start_socket
aqt.mpv.MPVProcessError: unable to start process

mpv too old or failed to open, reverting to mplayer
conf key heatmap should be fetched with col.get_config(), and saved with col.set_config()
conf key heatmap should be fetched with col.get_config(), and saved with col.set_config()
conf key heatmap should be fetched with col.get_config(), and saved with col.set_config()
Qt debug: Compositor returned null texture
Qt debug: Compositor returned null texture

Seems like it doesn’t want to open that mpv executable. Interestingly, the audio is working if I run it this way and that popup doesn’t show anymore.

Indeed, there is no libs folder in the anki_audio folder, but there is lib. If I rename lib to libs (this is after renaming)

it starts working.

Interestingly, after running Anki from the command line just now, I am now seeing that “Sound and video on cards
” bug. I see it now both when running Anki via icon and from the command line.

I wonder whether there some mechanism that caches dynamic libraries or the library path, such that Anki sound could previously work for me but now no longer work?

Just like on your system, renaming the library directory (I used ln -s lib libs in /Applications/Anki.app/Contents/Resources/app_packages/anki_audio) resolves the issue.

Edit: Added: I’m now wondering if I made an error and never actually attempted to review a card with audio during my previous testing of beta releases? Was the bug there and I just missed it?

Added: No, I wasn’t mistaken about Beta 1. There was some change between Beta 1 and Beta 2:

  • I re-installed 26.05b1 via .dmg file.
    • The directory is named libs
    • Audio plays just fine.
  • I re-installed 26.05b2 via .dmg file.
    • The directory is named lib
    • I see the “Sound and video on cards
” bug.

In other news, I saw that __CF_IS_OBJC + 52 crash again, with 26.05b2. It occurred when switching profiles.

  • I think the crash is intermittent, not actually related to any one specific action.
  • I suspect that the crash intermittently occurs when the Anki app creates a new window or dialog.
  • I note that I see QGuiApplication::setOverrideCursor() in the crash trace.
1 Like

Yes, that’s the intended behavior on Linux for now. There are probably some improvements that can be made here, but I went for the simple solution so we don’t have to worry about distro-specific issues.

Can you reproduce the issue if you switch the Preferences > Video Driver option to Software?

Confirmed. This is a new issue in this beta. Thank you for testing!

1 Like

No, I was using “Metal” and switching to “Software” fixed the issue, thanks

Using Tools > Check for Updates to do the upgrade from b1 to b2 didn’t really work properly.

The install process said that Anki needed to be closed in order to complete the install, and asked for permission to do so. But then it failed to actually close Anki, with the main Decks window remaining onscreen.

It was impossible to close Anki manually because the install dialog is modal and had exclusive focus. So the install process stumbled through a whole series of error messages or warnings with various further prompts before finally reaching “Finish”. And then it complained that Anki could not be restarted, misdiagnosing the cause as probably due to some add-on.

But at that point Anki could be closed manually and manually restarted, and it seems like the install did actually work, since Help > About Anki
 shows ⁚26.05b2 (975ab207)⁩, and checking Properties > Details for mpv in the Task Manager shows that it is indeed upgraded to version 0.41.0

I assume you’re seeing this after the MSI installer is run. Anki should have closed itself at that point after downloading the new version and opening the installer, unless if there are something preventing it (could be add-ons or anything locking its files).

Normally something like this should be shown when Anki is still running after the installer is run:

I can’t reproduce the issue of this dialog having exclusive focus if that’s what you mean.

I want to report a (possibly) old issue.

Since the new update, I have had the feeling that filtered decks are more consistent in gathering learning cards according to Descending Retrievability. I could probably attribute that to changes in the sorting behavior in the previous beta.

However, I have noticed that the cards shown in a normal deck are not in the same order as the cards displayed in a filtered deck shown with is:due, even though both are sorted by Descending Retrievability.

So maybe the changes in the sorting behavior did not fully carry over to the parent decks.

Parent Deck first card shown:

image

Same deck but in filtered decks first card:

Title: Linux Beta 26.05b2: Deck screen/study screen rendering issues with Vulkan and Software backends; OpenGL fails to render main screen

Version: Anki 26.05b2 (Linux x86_64)

Environment:

  • Linux

  • Running inside a Docker container with GUI forwarded to a browser (via a noVNC/Kasm-style setup)

  • Tested rendering backends: OpenGL, Vulkan, Software

Issue Summary:

I’m seeing different rendering failures depending on the graphics backend.

OpenGL

  • Anki launches, but the main deck screen does not render correctly.

  • Because the deck list is not visible, I cannot select a deck to begin studying.

  • The application window appears, but the main content area is not rendered and is completely black.

Vulkan

  • The deck selection screen renders correctly.

  • I can select a deck and start studying.

  • Once in the review screen, the card content area is completely blank/gray.

  • Buttons such as “Show Answer” are visible, but the card itself is not rendered.

  • The “Show Answer” button cannot be clicked.

Software Renderer

  • Same behavior as Vulkan.

  • The deck list is visible and selectable.

  • The review screen opens, but the card content area is blank/black.

Additional Notes

  • The issue occurs consistently.

  • The problem appears to be related to rendering of the web/card content area rather than general UI rendering.

  • Menu bars and control buttons remain visible.

  • On launch, any add-on error screens render correctly across all tested rendering backends.

Screenshot

Attached screenshot shows the review screen under the Vulkan and Software rendering backends, where the card area is blank while the rest of the UI remains visible.