I’m very confused, and don’t know whether it’s a bug or whether it’s a lack of explanation in the UI.
Let’s say you have a deck Parent::Children. No more card to review today. Parent has 0 new cards and Children has some cards. You try to review the Parent deck, open the custom study, and try to increase the number of new cards to review today.
Given that the number of cards in subdecks is also shown, I assume I’d see those cards. If I had to open the subdeck one by one, I’d assume there would something that let me know I’ve to touch the subdeck I want to review directly.
Also, “review ahead” allows to review cards in those subdecks, so, for the sake of the consistency, I’d assume that either both or none of the option consider the subdecks.
The documentation does not state exactly what is the expected interpretation. In any case, I’d consider adding a word about how this option will behave.
I’ve been confused by this too. My intuitive expectation is also that, if I make a custom study increasing today’s review limit on the parent deck, then it’d include cards from the subdecks.
I think this was changed when the ability to set subdeck-specific review limits was added, which was long requested by users. The deck-specific review limit logic likely messed up the custom study logic, which I assume (should check the source whether this is so) actually uses the same functions under the hood.
Custom study should display a message like “Available new cards: 0 (2 in subdecks)” in such circumstances.
You’re right that we need a better way of seeing which decks have cards themselves, and which have cards from children. This is something I’m hoping we can tackle as we rewrite the deck-list screen, as the info should already be available in the deck tree that’s being built, and it’s just a matter of presenting it to the user.