Crashing, when I press the + to collapse/expand my decks

Anki Help
1

From the title itself, I am new to MacBooks, i have a macbook neo that Ill use for making anki flashcards. The problem is whenever I try to expand/collapse (+) my deck, anki closes by itself. This happens when I rapidly click the + and even if I dont rapidly expand my deck there will come a time when I’ll press + anki suddenly closes. I have tried resetting the window size, changing my video driver but nothing is really working and this is frustrating because I want to create flashcards on the go and not rely on my computer

2

Run Anki in a terminal, reproduce that anki is closing and paste the entire terminal output. Make sure to run anki in safemode though (e.g. anki --safemode) while you do that.

Maybe something in the output will give a clue.

Edit: Found this on reddit: Crashing when pressing +. Is that you, too? If so, don’t double post without linking the previous post. You’re just wasting efforts that way. Danika on reddit (who reads the things here, too) gave plenty of good troubleshooting steps over reddit already.

3

I am able to reproduce this bug behavior on my M1 Mac mini (2020), macOS Tahoe 26.5.2, Anki 26.05, Metal (default) video driver. My observations:

  • The bug occurs with safemode both enabled or disabled. (I don’t use add-ons, and I don’t have any add-ons installed.)
  • The bug is intermittent. The bug seems to be reliably reproducible, although the frequency seems to vary from “almost immediately” to “very infrequently”. My testing history:
    1. Launched Anki from the Dock icon. The bug occured within the first 5 seconds of testing.
    2. Launched Anki from the Terminal. The bug occurred within the first 5 seconds of testing.
    3. Launched Anki --safemode from the Terminal. The bug did not occur in 2-3 minutes of testing, and I stopped testing.
    4. Launched Anki from the Terminal. The bug did not occur in 2 minutes of testing. Then, I paused testing for 1 minute, resumed testing, and the bug occurred immediately, as soon as I pressed the “+” one time.
    5. Launched Anki --safemode from the Terminal. The bug occurred after 3-4 minutes of testing.
    6. Launched Anki --safemode from the Terminal. The bug did not occur in 3 minutes of testing. Then, I paused testing for 1 minute, resumed testing, and the bug occurred immediately, as soon as I pressed the “+” one time.
  • My perception is that the bug occurs when simply pressing the “+” button during the course of using Anki normally. Rapidly pressing the “+/-” buttons is not necessary to reproduce the bug; doing so seems to be just a way to induce the bug to occur faster.
  • The behavior that I perceive is that Anki does not seem to “crash”. Instead, it appears that Anki simply “quits”.
  • When Anki is run from the Terminal, no error message is printed when the bug occurs. The Anki process simply ends, silently. The last message seen in the Terminal is Starting main loop...:
~ % /Applications/Anki.app/Contents/MacOS/Anki --safemode
2026-07-10 09:23:03.470 Anki[46547:1664019] No Python NSLog handler found. stdout/stderr will not be captured.
2026-07-10 09:23:03.470 Anki[46547:1664019] To capture stdout/stderr, add 'std-nslog' to your app dependencies.
Starting Anki 26.05...
2026-07-10 09:23:04,685:INFO:aqt.mediasrv: Serving on http://127.0.0.1:52382
Starting main loop...
~ %

I have not tested any other video driver settings.

4

thats me too, thanks for telling me that I couldnt seem to fix the issue with the latest anki, however I installed an older release of anki. So far it hasnt quit when I do the issue.

5

thank you for this, now that I installed an older version of anki I seem to not find the bug anymore (i hope so) for now ill stick with this version 25.09, I sure do hope no one experiences this and I hope your team fixes it, anki is goated and so are you guys, thanks for having the time to reply to me, will be updating if this version also crashes.

7

Odd that nothing is being printed. I cannot reproduce in linux either, which makes it even more odd.

Can you provide info on how to reproduce starting from a fresh profile?

8

Steps to Reproduce:

  1. Add a new Profile and then Open it. (I named miine “Testing2”.)
  2. Create Deck to create a new subdeck and parent. (I created “Test::Sub1”.)
  3. Toggle the “+”/“-” button next to “Test” to expand/collapse the deck.
  4. At this point, you can try to toggle the “+”/“-” button rapidly to try to induce the bug faster.
  5. Or, you can stop temporarily leaving Anki up and running, go do something else for a few minutes, and then come back and to start another round of toggling the “+”/“-” button.

I believe I just saw an instance where the bug occurred when pressing the “-” button to collapse a deck.

It appears that Anki is actually crashing, not just quitting, because if Anki starts with one profile, then I switch to a different profile and reproduce the bug, when Anki is re-opens it does so with the original profile, not the one that was switched to. So, Anki appears to have crashed without saving the current profile setting.

9

I still cannot reproduce on linux. If this were linux, I’d run anki in gdb and get a full bt (backtrace) after the crash is observed.

Can you run anki in a debugger and paste the backtrace (if any)?

10

I installed gdb, but I am not sure how to use it.

~ % gdb -silent /Applications/Anki.app/Contents/MacOS/Anki
Reading symbols from /Applications/Anki.app/Contents/MacOS/Anki...

⚠️ warning: `/Users/runner/work/briefcase-macOS-Xcode-template/briefcase-macOS-Xcode-template/stub/build/gui-stub/macos/xcode/build/GUI Stub.build/Release/GUI Stub.build/Objects-normal/arm64/main.o': can't open to read symbols: No such file or directory.
(No debugging symbols found in /Applications/Anki.app/Contents/MacOS/Anki)
(gdb) run
❌️ Don't know how to run.  Try "help target".
(gdb)

I don’t have full Xcode installed.

11

I can only tell you how to do it in linux:

gdb --args anki --safemode
r
bt full
q

First line opens anki in the debugger with safemode enabled.
Second line runs the program.
3rd line prints full backtrace.
Last line quits debugger.

It that doesn’t work for you / on a mac, I unfortunately don’t know how to solve it.

Edit: Just to clarify, you can use run or r. Both should work. Yours clearly doesn’t but I don’t know why.

Edit 2: Maybe try something like this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4917377/gdb-claims-it-doesnt-know-how-to-run

12

I tried some more but ultimately was never able to get gdb to work successfully. I also tried to code-sign gdb but was unable to get the certificate identity to show up on the System keychain.

I did test different video driver settings in Anki, and I saw the bug occur with all 3 video driver settings: Metal (default), OpenGL, and Software.

13

hello ben, right now Anki is running smoothly but I Installed an older version 25.06 i think, anki hasnt crashed for a while so that fixes it temporarily, I hope you guys can find a way to fix it as I want the latest version, If I could be of any help please tell me

14

Only if we can identify the cause of it. Currently, we don’t know the cause.

Depending on your technical know-how, you might be able to do the things that I asked @BenJamesBen to do. Maybe you have more luck than he does and can retrieve the backtrace; that should hopefully contain something that helps us fix it.