I noticed that importing a file selecting “Ignore lines…”, anki doesn’t check only the occurence of the line in the choosen deck, but in all decks.
If I have for example an english-german deck and and english-french deck, and want to import a file into the english-french deck, ignoring entries that are already present in this deck, anki ignores also the lines where first field matches an existing entry in the english-german deck.
One can achieve this, removing all other decks from the application, but it’s not that comfortable. Is there another solution?
Anki checks for duplicates based on the note type, not the deck. From the manual (emphasis mine):
When importing text files, Anki uses the first field to determine if a note is unique. By default, if the file you are importing has a first field that matches one of the existing notes in your collection and that existing note is the same type as the type you’re importing, the existing note’s other fields will be updated based on content of the imported file. A drop-down box in the import screen allows you to change this behaviour, to either ignore duplicates completely, or import them as new notes instead of updating existing ones.
You can work around this by making a separate note type for the english-french notes.
I would think that’s because note fields (which what gets compared obviously) are properties of the note type rather than the deck, and it’s recommended that you use a different note type for each topic.
Decks are more broad and used for organizing study rather than the structure of your notes.
But I forgot to mention that you don’t actually have to bother creating a different note type and duplicating your card templates: you can tell Anki to import even if the notes are duplicates. Choose the Import even if existing note has same first field option in the import screen. Anki will still warn you about duplicate notes when editing these notes but you don’t have to listen to it
