I did a long search on this forum and on the general world wide web but cannot find an answer to my question (or maybe it’s there, but I don’t get it…?).
Here it goes: I started using optional reverse cards for my vocab deck and the net said to “write anything in the ‘Add Reverse’ to add the reverse card” - so I started putting “y” in there and indeed, new cards (Card 2) started appearing.
However, when I go to the first version of the card (Card 1), and delete the “y” in the “Add Reverse” line (so it’s empty) - but that doesn’t delete the reversed card created before (Card 2).
Is there a way to manipulate the cards easily so I can “un-reverse” some of the cards after studying for a while, if I think the second versions are redundant?
Is there a way to add “y” in bulk to all cards that have the card note set up as type (now I do it manually card by card, but of course I have tons of cards across all my decks…)?
If your edits have made some cards blank when they previously were not, however, Anki will not delete them immediately, as that could lead to accidental data loss. To remove the empty cards, go to Tools → Empty Cards in the main window. You will be shown a list of empty cards and be given the option to delete them.
For adding more reversed cards, you can change the note type of all the cards from the browse screen. Set the note type to “Basic (and reversed card)”.
As long as you haven’t changed the part of the card template that makes this work, after you remove the “y” from that field, Card 2 will show up like this:
You can use Tools > Empty Cards to delete that card permanently. (This will also delete all of that card’s review history, so suspending the card is another option to deal with it.)
For notes that are already added:
You can use Find and Replace. Search up all of the notes with that note type that have that field empty – "note:Basic (optional reversed card)" "Add Reverse:" (with the quotes, use the name of your actual note type) – select all – limit your replace to just that field, and replace the empty field with y.
For new notes that you add in the future:
If you find that you almost always want a reverse card created, you can use sticky fields to keep that field filled by default while you are adding notes.
Answer to question 1 (well, the instruction) was easy, thank you!
For question 2 - can you please be kind enough to look at the screenshot if I’m doing this right? Glossika is the name of the card type used, and I want to add “y” to all cards that have that card type. I clicked “Ok” on how I type it in on the screenshot and it gave me a feedback that “0 of 1 note was changed”. Why one? Why wasn’t it changed?
P.S. I’m not sure if I want to change all cards - I have a feeling it might be too much, but I do want to test it with this one Glossika deck and I specifically changed the note type to not get any other notes changed by mistake
Honestly, this technology business is not for the faint of heart, haha!
You could probably leave the “Find” blank, since you’ve already narrowed this down to notes where the field is empty (if you do that uncheck the regular expression box). What I wrote in the screenshot is a regular expression meaning “start-of-the-field end-of-the-field, with nothing in between.”
For the “In” field – “Add Reverse” that you have is correct.
I got it! When I used Browse & then Fin & Replace - and after finding all notes in Browse I also need to highlight all of them (that’s why it said “0 of 1 notes” because I only had one note highlighted/selected) - it worked!
