Hello,
I’m using Anki 2.1.49 on Mac 11.5.2 and I can’t delete cards currently because I don’t find the delete button anymore. It should appear either in the edit field or when right-clicking on the card but it’s not happening.
It’s under the Notes menu item in the browser. The context menu was changed because Anki now supports two display modes: Notes mode and Cards mode, which can be toggled from the button adjacent to the search box. You can also use Ctrl+Delete to delete a note in the browser and the reviewing screen.
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I have the same problem - I can’t delete a card. abdo’s answer only addresses how to delete a whole note.
I don’t have a solution, only a workaround, but it’s for my specific use case and may not apply to everyone.
I have a note template that creates multiple cards from certain fields (up to 5 total per note). When I later change the note and remove the contents of (some of) those fields, the cards remain in place, but are now empty.
In my case, that’s because Anki doesn’t consider the cards to be empty: the front-side template contains more than just the now-empty field. That also contains another field which remains filled in the note.
Example: a language learning deck for Spanish with a field “geo”, which may contain something like “Latam” or “Iberia” or “Colombia” or “Mexico, Centram, Uruguay”. I’ve set my front-side template to show this geo field in small gray text at the bottom.
Then I have a field for the primary word, and one for the translation, plus up to three more for synonyms. Each one of these three additional fields yields a separate card. All front-side templates include the “geo” field at the bottom.
Not all cards have three synonyms, of course. Some may just have one, others two, and most don’t have any. However, in notes that have the “geo” field filled, Anki always creates 5 cards for all synonym fields, regardless of them being filled or empty, because all front-side templates contain that field.
So this is not a bug in Anki, but rather a quirk, or at least a special edge case. It’s perfectly logical to keep cards around if at least one of the fields shown in the template is filled. However, in my case (and I imagine there are more than just this one), it calls for an option to delete such cards that are now “empty” manually.
Tools > Empty Cards doesn’t help here; it won’t recognize the empty cards because they are not technically empty due to the “geo” field.
Temporarily clearing the “geo” field and running the Empty Cards command does find and delete them, but Anki adds them back empty as soon as I re-populate the “geo” field.
I imagine a new field option to specify a field as permissible, i.e., its placement in a template shouldn’t influence card creation, would solve this particular issue. But this is added complexity for an arguably extremely fringe edge case, so I’m not advocating for its inclusion or consideration.
An option to manually delete undesired cards (vs. whole notes) would be an acceptable workaround though. This is what OP asked for, and it’s what I believe would be very useful to have for my special snowflake case as well.
Please read Card Generation - Anki Manual and Card Generation - Anki Manual
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I have the same problem. I have a card that is flagged as having no cloze 2. I’d like to be able to delete just this card. The empty cards tool finds 50 other cards. I don’t want to run that without checking all of the cards it has flagged. I don’t want to allocate the time to check all of those cards right now.
I feel obligated to echo the OP’s frustration: nested context menus are a dreadful idea, and I was quite surprised by this move. Flat is better than nested, to quote The Zen of Python. For people with alternative pointer devices for accessibility reasons, it is likely pretty onerous to have to right click and then play the maze game keeping your cursor on the menu to navigate to the right spot in the submenu.
@flipside555 You can suspend the card and deal with it later.
@langfield I agree that submenus make things harder to select, but I fear the alternative of displaying everything in a flat list will end up scrolling off the screen of some displays, and you can also access the menus from the menubar at the top.
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@dae Huh, had no idea this could happen on Windows. Obviously that would be a serious problem. However, have you had any reports of this issue prior to switching to the nested version?
Navigating to and picking an action from the sub menu was not intended to be a regular operation. There are multiple alternatives:
- Use the toolbar.
- Use a shortcut.
- Switch to the appropriate mode (cards / notes) before using the context menu.
- Use underlined access keys (Windows only).
I don’t think anyone else in this thread complained about the nesting. Instead they wanted to know how to delete cards. In the past, users had used the Delete action and only later realised that whole notes were gone.
Apart from decluttering the long and growing list of context actions, one goal of the sub menus was to make it clearer what entity an action affects. This seems to have been a success.
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Your justification for making something difficult to use is “use something else”? Why not just get rid of it then?
Three of your proposed alternatives require the user to know keyboard shortcuts. While certainly many folks do, I think beginners and less computer-literate users are unlikely to get much use out of these. The toolbar suffers from a similar problem, in that there is not a toolbar for every GUI program, and for the ones that do have them, each one is arranged differently.
Right-clicking on stuff, on the other hand, is universal, foolproof, and really only requires you to be able to read the options presented. It is the working computer user’s bread and butter.
Attention to beginners is considered important, because most computer programmers will always be such, and because many beginners never widen their knowledge, limiting themselves to work in aspects of the language in which they specialize.
-Wikpedia page for C++11, Design goals
I think the above advice holds for users of tools like Anki as well as programming languages. The people on this forum are not representative of the average user.
In the past, users had used the Delete action and only later realised that whole notes were gone.
That sounds like a case for a more descriptive name, rather than a case for hiding something. It’s as if there was a button labeled ‘SEND’ that sent emails, but was often confused for a button that sent missiles, and instead of making the text more specific, the designers put the button in its own room, behind a door labeled ‘EMAILS’.
I don’t think anyone else in this thread complained about the nesting.
To be clear, when I asked if anyone had reported this issue prior to making the switch, I meant, ‘has anyone every complained about the context menus being cluttered?’
Apart from decluttering the long and growing list of context actions
By making them harder to get to. Why not declutter the instrument panels in airplanes by putting most of the buttons in the rear bathroom?
I was not justifying anything. Why would I? I was trying to be helpful and explain the reasoning behind a design decision. But if you’re deliberately misunderstanding me that’s impossible.