This feature in fact has already been implemented in my fork (gh/ahmedyarub/anki/pull/1). The authors asked me to add poll for features before creating them.
Since I’m not allowed to create polls, please answer with yay or nay!
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- Yay
- Nay
- Not sure
0
voters
I suggest the opposite: a pinned deck. Something akin to the image below.
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I’ll create another poll for this feature. It is easy to implement in addition to being very useful Thank you 
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I don’t think a poll without prior discussion is very meaningful, so here are my two cents.
There are already users who struggle to find collapsed decks or fields. An accidentally hidden deck would be nearly impossible to rediscover for inexperienced users, causing frustration and increased demand for support.
It seems more trouble than it’s worth it, considering there is already a very similar feature with deck collapsing.
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Maybe we can add simple markers to denote that there are hidden decks? Or maybe when you hide a deck the first time you get a message saying that you can see hidden decks by going to preferences?
I agree with the discussion part. This was my first contribution and I started with coding and then with proposing the feature hehe. Next time I’ll do it the right way.
Right now, it seems that most people are against it, so unless the results of the poll change drastically, there is no point in discussing the details of a potential implementation.
I would suggest to integrate the feature as an add-on, so that advanced users will use it as needed, and those who are not “in” enough, will not have to deal with problems.
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There are two reasons for me to not implement these features as plugins:
1- From my understanding, the plugins work only on the desktop which is a show stopper to begin with.
2- I’m planning to add dozens of features with a large variety of themes and I don’t think that creating dozens of plugins is meaningful.
I think that maintaining a hard-fork for the unapproved features is a better idea.
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I don’t know why you would think that. 
With an add-on, you can demonstrate the usability and benefits of the features you’re interested in. They will be available to nearly every Anki user (the non-Desktop users are small in number). You will control their updatability.
[There is the added benefit that it will give you a chance to demonstrate a commitment to the Anki community of learners. It would be unfortunate for anyone to get the impression that you are not willing to contribute features that may be useful to some unless you are given free reign to insert them directly into Anki as native functionality. Or that your plan is to just use Anki’s code to launch a competing app – as some of your posts seem to suggest …]
Maybe let’s not tell the valuable developers who have created dozens of add-ons that you think it’s not a meaningful contribution? 
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Oh I’m sorry if you understood that I’m launching a competing app based on Anki’s code. That is a completely unethical thing and I would never do it.
I personally create all of my cards on my PC but I always review on the phone (iOS), which gave me the impression that at least 50% of the users use their phones for reviewing. Do you have any official statistics showing the distribution of the platforms used for reviewing? I’m genuinely curious about this.
If the number of desktop users really constitutes the majority then I might contribute a plugin and create my own version (without distributing it) of the mobile app with these new features.
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Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. I always use desktop for editing and mobile for reviewing. For that reason, I never use plugins. I am surprised at the idea that mobile users are comparatively few. Is that just a guess or are there stats to back that up, such as by AnkiWeb syncs by device?
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Glad to hear it! 
I don’t have stats to point you to. My take is primarily based on who’s asking questions and what they are asking about – which apps are asked about most frequently; how often/rarely folks don’t have access to Desktop at all; how often/rarely folks mention a strict split between where they create and review, from which apps (and of what screens) they are posting screenshots, etc. I don’t think it’s possible to get stats on where folks are doing their reviews, because device isn’t recorded in the revlog.
But to be clear, I wasn’t suggesting there are few Droid/Mobile users overall – I was only suggesting that there are few Droid/Mobile exclusive users. Droid/Mobile-only for studying would probably be a bit higher, but I feel like people wouldn’t spend such significant amounts of energy customizing their Desktop UIs if they weren’t using it a lot for studying. [No shade, just an observation 
]
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Same goes for forking the Anki Desktop repo.
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I don’t really agree with you. I’m already updating the desktop and Android versions. In addition to that, I’m updating the backend which is half of the work required for migrating to iOS and web.
As I said before, once my changes gather a critical mass I will create desktop and iOS clients. In fact, I already have a side-project that uses one programming language (C++), one framework (Qt), CMake, and vcpkg which are the de facto standards for cross-platform GUI app with easy (-ish) dependency management. I can easily create a similar app that has only one code-base which works everywhere, and open-source it.
Now I do realize that this might hurt the income stream of the original authors, which is not fair at all given that they literally transformed my life. But you are not leaving me with any viable option beyond had-forking and creating a unified client.
PLEASE don’t consider me the enemy here. Just give me a solution that works, not partial solutions. <3
It seems to me that there are many more potential users of the add-on than those who are ready to fork the version of the application.
It is not necessary to make a separate addition for each function.
If each developer made their own parallel version of anki instead of an add-on, this would reduce the capabilities of this program.
Additional functionality is not always good. The difficulty of maintaining the application and the difficulty of learning the application for beginners is increasing. An addon is a good way to test the popularity of ideas before implementation.
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You’ve provided one PR so far, and I said I didn’t think its inclusion was justified. The next day, you’re effectively giving us the ultimatum “accept my features regardless of how you feel about them, or I’ll hard fork the project and undermine the sole source of Anki’s funding”. Can you see how that might be perceived?
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I’m struggling to find a way to both keep the project financially viable for you and have the liberty of adding new features. At the end of the day, why did you even open-source it if you didn’t want people to reuse the code?
Let’s try to find a middle ground: what if I help you to develop a plugins system that (mostly) works on all systems, unless of course it has a hard dependency on a specific platform?
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I believe people should be able to modify the program to suit their needs, and I picked a license that allows them to do that. There’s quite a difference between adding features to a personal fork, and the nuclear option of creating a separate distribution and separate iOS client however.
AnkiMobile is not open source, because a) it required a complete rewrite for a proprietary OS at the time, and b) it would be much harder to raise any funds if anyone could trivially build their own version.
The only plugin system that Apple would allow on iOS is a JS one. Anki has been gradually migrating its old Python-centric code to JS, but there is still a lot of work to do, and we have had little time so far to flesh out how JS plugins should work. If you wish to participate in the discussion or implementation, @Rumo created this ticket a few days ago: How to make web pages extensible by add-ons? · Issue #3187 · ankitects/anki · GitHub
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I would be very happy to help with that JS migration initiative! And I reiterate my wishes to see Anki prospering.
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