Hello
When adding a new note, Anki’s duplicate check currently treats words with different capitalization as distinct entries.
For example:
Adding “Apple” first, and then “apple” → Anki does not detect the second card as a duplicate, and it allows me to add it as if it were a unique note.
This behavior can lead to unwanted duplicate cards that only differ in letter case, which is undesirable in most language-learning scenarios (where capitalization is not semantically meaningful).
Anki should ideally:
Treat capitalization differences as duplicates by default, or
Provide an optional setting (e.g., “Ignore case when checking for duplicates”) for users who prefer case-insensitive duplicate detection.
Thanks for your great work on Anki and for continuously improving this amazing tool!
Why do you say capitalization isn’t semantically meaningful?
In German it distinguishes the noun Arm (arm) from the adjective arm (poor).
In Russian it distinguished the name Лев (Lev) or constellation Лев (Leo) from the animal лев (lion).
Even in the example you gave, Apple is the name of a company and a brand, while apple is a fruit.
In an English dictionary only proper nouns are capitalized, while ordinary words are not. When creating an Anki card, it makes sense to enter words in their typical dictionary form.
A good suggestion. People rarely use capitalisation in semantically meaningful ways when creating notes. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have case-insensitive searches.
The duplicate search can also use some other feature additions, like stripping whitespace before looking for duplicates.