Deck options customization (suggestion)

Anki Beta Testing
1

Deck options groups is a great feature, but IMO, it doesn’t work very well with the new scheduler v3, which introduces a lot more flexibility and would require a complementary system to be able to easily customize and fine-tuning single deck options.

I’ll try to explain what I mean with an example: suppose I have this:

Main deck 1

  • Subdeck A (100 cards)
  • Subdeck B (100 cards)
  • Subdeck C (100 cards)

The main deck and all three subdecks use the same deck group options, which is heavily customized. Now suppose I want to study the Main deck 1 (which is configured to pick random cards from subdecks A, B and C) with these settings:

Main deck 1: 30 new cards a day, choosed randomly from subdecks A, B and C

  • Subdeck A (max 5 new cards a day)
  • Subdeck B (max 10 cards a day)
  • Subdeck C (max 15 cards a day)

Please, correct me if I’m wrong, but with the current system, I would need to create 4 different deck option groups and manually copy all my settings in all of them from the scratch just to change the “new cards/day” value in each of them. Doable, but a little bit cumbersome.

What I mean is that, while the new scheduler offers a lot of flexibility for fine-tuning single deck options, the current deck options system doesn’t seems to be designed to allow such a flexibility.

A couple of ideas to consider:

  • Add a “Save as” feature in the new deck options window.
    Currently, if you want to modify a single parameter for a single deck, you have to actually add a new deck option group with “add config”, which actually deletes all your current settings and forces you to manually copying them agains from scratch.
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    “Saves as” would save your modifications without erasing the other parameters.

  • Allow deck options customization.
    It would be still better if the user could modify the deck options of single deck without the need of saving the changes as a new deck group options, which doesn’t make much sense if all we want is just to modify the new cards a day value for a single deck, as in the example above. Deck options groups could still work as “presets” settings, but fully customizable by the user.

2

A “Save as” option sounds useful and would remove the need of manual copying that’s currently necessary in order to create a new, almost identical options group as you’ve described.
But I don’t see the point of the second suggestion. Granted, it saves a few clicks when creating new deck. But the current system saves so much more time, every time you adjust some settings, because in the end, most users have options group that are shared by many decks.

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3

In the previous example, if you have this:

  • Subdeck A (100 cards)
  • Subdeck B (100 cards)
  • Subdeck C (100 cards)

And just want to change the new cards a day limit in each subdeck, keeping the other settings:

  • Subdeck A (max 5 new cards a day)
  • Subdeck B (max 10 cards a day)
  • Subdeck C (max 15 cards a day)

It doesn’t make much sense to me to create three new groups just for that.
“Save as” would work, for sure, but being able to change a single parameter without being forced to save your entire deck settings as a new group setting would be easier, IMO.

4

The next alpha will add a clone option. I can appreciate how it may make things a bit awkward if you’re giving separate limits to each one of your decks, but I think the common case is to have multiple subdecks each with the same limit, and optimizing for the former case would disadvantage the latter. It also adds another layer of complexity, as now we’d have some options that apply to the deck and some that apply to the preset group.

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