Anki prevents adding basic cards with cloze tags

Anki Desktop
1

Background:

I came back to Anki after a year. I have a card template which adds 3 different cards (which means it must be derived from Basic - I can’t derive from cloze, because then I can’t add other card types). The two fields that matter are:

  • Sentence - this is where the cloze is added.
  • Word - you are supposed to type this in.

This card template relies on two “undefined behaviors”:

  • (optional) First basic card’s cloze is hidden on the front and revealed on the back.
  • Javascript embedded in tags to hide the cloze on the front of the card.
    It works. But…

The problem:

The problem is with the UI. At some point it was updated to:

  • not respond to ctrl+shift+c (shortcut for adding a cloze) when editing basic cards.
  • disallow adding basic cards with the “cloze” pattern entirely. Before it only complained - a reasonable behavior in my opinion. Now, it looks like this (see the attached image). Clicking “Ok” only cancels the dialog and does not insert the note.

Why it’s… inconvenient:

I can create a plugin that would reproduce the ctrl+shift+c behavior. But that arbitrary block forces me to either update the older cards (which still are properly displayed) to use a new pattern or create a virtually identical copy, with the only difference being a slightly different cloze-pattern.

Is there a way to turn this behavior off?

(copied from Reddit, because I figured it might fit better here)

2

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The image.

Additionally, I understand, that having a shortcut for a cloze when editing a basic card is “normally” undesirable and removing it might make the UI cleaner, but, at the same time, straight up forbidding even having a cloze pattern in a note is, in my opinion, wholly unnecessary.

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3

Cloze deletion was not intended to be used that way, and those checks are there because it was a common source of user confusion. Instead of using Anki’s native cloze deletions on standard notetypes, maybe you could accomplish something similar using the closet add-on.

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