Card Browser: Allow individual note fields as selectable columns in Note mode

Anki Suggestions
1

Feature Request

Summary: In the Card Browser (both Anki Desktop and AnkiDroid), Note mode should allow selecting individual note fields as browser columns — not just the built-in “Sort Field”, “Question”, “Answer”, etc.

Use Case

I’m learning Romanian from Russian using a custom 4-field note type:

  • RussianWord — clean word/phrase

  • RussianContext — example sentence with HTML styling

  • RomanianWord — clean word/phrase

  • RomanianContext — example sentence with HTML styling and English gloss

The card templates combine all 4 fields so that during review I see the word plus styled context. This works perfectly.

However, when browsing my deck, I want to quickly scan just the clean Russian and Romanian words — without the context HTML. Currently this is impossible:

  • “Sort Field” only shows the first field (RussianWord) — I can’t see RomanianWord cleanly

  • “Question”/“Answer” render the full card template, so context and HTML tags leak into the browser view

  • There is no option to select RomanianWord (or any other individual field) as a column

Right-clicking the column header in Anki Desktop (Note mode) only offers built-in columns — no custom fields appear.

Proposed Solution

In Note mode, the column chooser should list all fields of the selected note type as available columns. For example, if I filter to notes of type Romanian-Russian 4-field, I should be able to add RussianWord, RomanianWord, etc. as separate, clean-text columns.

This would make the browser usable for multi-field note types where the card template adds styling/context that shouldn’t appear when scanning a word list.

Scope

This affects both Anki Desktop and AnkiDroid — neither currently supports this. Since AnkiDroid follows Desktop’s behavior, this may need to be addressed upstream in Anki Desktop first.

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  • Sort field can be changed from the manage fields screen.
  • Question and answer can be changed from the template editor’s browser appearance.
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