My situation is this: I’ve developed card templates for one note type. There are a lot of templates (covering declensions, etc.) and they are a bit complex. I’m preparing a new note type that will need cards dealing with situations very similar to those that the original cards deal with (think adding a new gender for the declensions). I’d like to copy all the templates from the old note type to the new and then edit them as required to suit the new note type. Is there a way to do this?
You can clone an existing notetype from the tools>manage notetypes screen, then apply the changes you want.
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I did not explain my problem well in the OP, for which my apologies. “New” was the wrong word to use in that context. What I actually want to do is to copy card templates from one existing notetype to another. I was thinking that copying templates to an existing notetype would in some sense make that notetype “new”, but obviously it wouldn’t.
I have a number of use cases, but the one that is currently causing me problems is with adjectives. I have one notetype for adjectives that decline regularly and one for those that decline irregularly. I recently found that for both notetypes I need to make very similar changes to the templates for the cards testing my ability to decline adjectives and to use adjectives in context. The changes are significant, there a more than a few card templates that need to be changed and each notetype has a considerable number of notes already entered.
Rather than having to make changes to individual card templates twice, which would be quite a chore, I would like to modify the regular adjective notetype’s card templates and then copy those templates to the irregular adjective notetype. I would then make the relatively minor changes to the copied templates required to adjust those templates to be appropriate for irregular adjectives.
I have not been able to figure out a way to do this efficiently.
Again, apologies for the poorly phrased OP.
There’s currently no template snippet support in anki, but I wonder if it’d be possible via an addon. There’s no pre-template rendering hook afaik, only one after rendering
Definitely beyond my skill level, unfortunately.
It might be time to consider whether those need separate note types. There are some situations where having separate note types is an advantage, and some where having a unified note type that knows how to make different sets of cards for different purposes (or show different things on those cards) is an advantage.
It sounds like making these updates will be a lot of work, so if they are more similar than they are different – and especially if this is a situation that could repeat itself in the future – the path of least resistance might be to start pulling them together. Tools like conditional replacement can be used to control what cards are created and what is displayed on them. It might be as simple as adding an extra field to indicate whether this is a regular (or irregular, whichever there are fewer of) adjective.
The next “fastest” way to do this is to make all of your template changes in a separate text document and then copy them in to the templates of each card on each note type.
I agree that a single note type could well be the best solution in a situation of this kind. There are two drawbacks to that approach in my circumstances, though. First, and more generally, is an issue of data entry. Since I’m testing against all possible genders, numbers and cases of the adjectives, there are more than 60 possibilities and so more than 60 fields that have to be entered for the positive form of an adjective alone, not to mention the comparative and the superlative. (As a practical matter, there may be some regularities in these, but I have to allow for all possibilities.) For a regular adjective there are far, far fewer fields required. So, if I used the same note for both irregular and regular adjectives, when entering data I’d have to scroll past a lot of fields to get to other fields that I use for testing (e.g., cases governed by the adjective and prepositions used with it). I could rearrange my field order of course, which would reduce this problem. I’d also have to add some logic to the effect of “Is this a regular or irregular adjective?”, but that would not be too hard.
The other difficulty is that I already have a bunch of notes for both types of adjectives, so I’d have to merge the notetypes that I’ve created for them. I seem to remember an addon for this, but I haven’t tried it yet.
What would be great is if there were some way to export all the card templates for a note. Then I could copy paste them into an editing program like Notepad++ , which would make the editing that you suggest much easier. Of course, there would also have to be a capability to import the modified card templates.
For the time being, though, it looks like I will be using your second suggested method.