I have grown to love the Auto-Advance feature, and use it constantly to get more cards done while doing mundane tasks. There are a couple features that I would really like to see added to it.
Firstly, I think there should be at least three separate autoadvance profiles that you can set and switch between via shortcuts. I would love to have a fast, medium, and slow setting that I can switch between on the fly depending on what I’m doing, or what I’m studying. An added bonus would be the ability to set different actions in each profile as well, but personally I would primarily use this feature for different timer settings.
Secondly, I would also love for the auto advance feature to continue to advance when the Anki window is not in focus. As it is now, it automatically disables when a different window is in focus, which is unfortunate.
Thirdly, it would be nice if auto advance had a duplicate input safeguard feature. More frequently than one would think, I get inpatient and hit an input right as auto advance is also inputting an action, which results in erroneous card answers or card reveals. It would be neat to have a setting that added a second or so of dead zone around the 00:00 timer.
I am envisioning something simple. Different setting profiles in a dropdown menu within the Auto-Advance setting section, each of which can be configured separately. For example, Profile 1 has an advance to answer time of 10 seconds and an action of answering ‘Good’ after 5 seconds, and Profile 2 has an advance to answer time of 20 seconds, and an action of answer ‘Again’ after 15 seconds. Within the review window, one can already hit Shift+A to toggle the Auto-Advance feature. With this profile feature, you could also switch between different Auto-Advance settings by pressing a different hotkey combination (eg Shift+1, Shift+2, etc.) within the review window. This would make it easy to switch between different Auto-Advance configurations, depending on my preference at the time, without having to go back into the settings menu and reconfigure the Auto-Advance settings manually each time.
Varying the timing per preset is indeed a workaround, but this still requires going into the settings menu, and changing the settings profile of the deck I am studying each time I want to change timing settings. Maybe if there was a hotkey shortcut that did this action instead, it would make more overall sense/have more utility for more users. Either way, it’s the hotkey shortcut that would make this a customizable and user friendly utility.
Thank you for taking the time to elaborate. I’m a bit concerned about the added complexity this would bring to the UI, but I’ll keep an eye on demand for such a feature.
Thank you for your consideration, dae. And yes that’s totally understandable. One possible idea to simplify the default appearance of the UI would be to collapse these additional features behind a accordion that is off by default. The setting toggle could be titled “Enable Multiple Auto-Advance Profiles,” or “Customize Auto-Advance Profiles.” If collapsible settings accordions are not within the functionality of Anki, which I’m not sure if it is, maybe just grouping these features under an “Advanced Settings” tab or subsection to make it cleaner but accessible for those that want it.