I’m on agreement with you on everything else except this. I didn’t explain the why on my previous reply so I’ll do here. There are two ways you can do this feature:
Save everything including options you haven’t touched to selected presets.
Save everything you have touched, which includes all the changes you made.
I believe all of us can agree the first one wouldn’t be useful for most people. So, the second one should be used which you propose. here are some issues we still face:
If the user is changing a lot of options, they don’t have any way to track what they changed and what they didn’t.
If the user wants to revert a change they made, it’s not clear whether Anki would save that change too.
It’s also not clear how to set a particular setting to the default the options screen opens with. So, do you change the review limit to a non-default and then change it back to default? Simply focus on the field?
One way to solve all of this is to gray out the options (or some other visual feedback) to mean these won’t be applied anywhere. Users then could be allowed to select options they want to apply to multiple presets.
However, it doesn’t work with the current workflow. Users are opening the deck options for a particular preset and are provided with both “save to this preset” and “save to…” options. How do we know which one the user is trying to do?
I hope my concerns make sense. Feel free to ask anything.
That’s a pretty radical suggestion and I’m not sure it solves any issue in particular that Anon_0000’s solution already doesn’t. Apart from the things you added in disadvantages, here are some other things:
A change like this will confuse many users. People want things to “just work” and so it’s better to make less radical changes.
We are moving commonly used operations in a seperate page and moving deck options to another. It will be a lot of work to make this work across platforms.
Many many tutorials and solutions in this forum will start making less sense for users.
We will have to do more changes in documentation. And there aren’t a lot of us who contribute there.
Another thing is:
It really is a very different suggestion and merits its own thread. Otherwise, we’ll just be stuck in an eternal cycle of debate and discussion.
Respectfully, I don’t see how your points apply to my suggestion:
How is moving those two options to a single screen called “deck options” more “radical” than adding completely new windows to select presets and saving them.
I don’t see how this is an issue since moving features is easier than creating new ones. It’s just 2 text boxes anyway (for renaming and editing description). The preset stuff being moved to one more screen shouldn’t be challenging either.
Tutorials about renaming a deck and changing its description?
Anon_0000’s solution doesn’t address deck specific options (these are only the “This deck”/“Today only” card limits and the “Save to All Subdecks” option "AFAIK).
It’s also a bit confusing: the user clicks on “Deck options” and is presented with a choice between editing presets and selecting presets. Then there’s the whole preset selection screen, which involves selecting decks other than the one the user originally clicked on, i.e. there is almost no difference between clicking the gear icon on any deck.
With my idea (moving preset specific options to a new screen) the deck options screen felt empty. On the other hand, we have the options to rename and edit a deck’s description taking up unnecessary space, especially on AnkiDroid. Hence my suggestion.
BTW, I just had an idea to fix the following, at least on desktop:
Remove the gear menu: Clicking the gear on the deck picker screen should just open the deck options (export is available in the toolbar).
Make separate PRs if you want, but these are all related imho.
I’m also wondering whether auto save is actually desirable. Personally, I’d probably be against auto save.
Thanks for your description and the image, that really helped to clear things up!
The first two make a lot of sense. I don’t understand what you’re trying to describe with number 3, though. Could you paraphrase please?
I was quite unhappy with this one as well. I thought about seperating them somehow, but I figured it would be confusing to find the same setting in two different places, just because one affects the presets and one affects the deck directly.
But how do you (quickly) access all the features that are inside that gear menu for the selected deck? Also: Removing it would break quite a few addons that use this gear menu as well.
Anki settings not the deck options. There are just 5 options in the deck options menu I suggest (the preset, the new daily limit, the review daily limit, the name, and the description) so I think autosave won’t do any harm.
To be clear, the “Manage presets” screen would still have a save button.
As I mentioned, renaming and description editing would be in the deck options, so it would be just: click the gear → type in the text boxes → leave. Exporting isn’t something you do every day, and even when you wan to, the manual says to “click the File menu and choose Export” .
Another idea is right clicking to show the current small menu that appears when clicking on the gear. Maybe this can deal with the addons problem.
Sidenote: AnkiDroid currently has too many options when long pressing on a deck. I’m thinking of customizable swiping to the right for deleting and to the left for renaming similar to what some apps like Bundled Notes do, but I digress.
Sure, so let’s say you open the deck options screen and New cards/day is set to 20. You want to make this option 20 in other presets too. Now, what do you do?
If you don’t touch this option, it’s not saved to all the other presets.
If you touch this option, then it’s not clear what Anki would/should do.
The second point is basically what I described earlier, if I change 20 → 2 → 20 should Anki save this 20 to all the presets I am going to save to?
I hope that’s clearer. Deck options are opening with 20 because that’s the option for the current preset but I want this same number for my other presets too.
I am a bit more optimist now that this issue can be solved if we do:
A screen with all options grayed out by default. And you can maybe click on a ⨁ button to add to your cart whatever options you want to change.
I think you can’t have a single screen with both options “Save to…” and “Save to this preset”.
You’ll have to change the flowchart slightly. Maybe have a seperate button called “Change options for multiple presets”. This opens the screen I described.
That’s the gist of what I think should happen. Hopefully, you have better ideas.
It is because that’s not what we have been calling deck options for all these year. Historically, the sorting/scheduling/burying related settings have always been part of the “Deck options”. And these options were divided into “Options group” which is now called “Presets”. You are suggesting:
We have a preset manager with the “deck options” in a seperate screen.
We have a seperate deck options with rename/edit descrip etc. and I assume you want this to be also grouped?
It’s not hard to see why many users would have a fixed idea for what deck options even mean.
New svelte screens can be shared across platforms. AnkiDroid (I can’t speak for AnkiMobile) wouldn’t need to change a lot of things on their end.
Yes, but also about deck options which are more common.
For instance, the content in deck-options.md file have to be completely replaced by other stuff and we wouldn’t have the redirect option because you’re suggesting we keep the name “Deck options” for this essentially new screen.
Yes, it should open in the deck options screen. Or, we should have a seperate place for accessing preset manager.
I get you, but I think the options you’re talking about are simply referred to as “Deck options”. Should we move towards using a different name? Maybe. But that’ll confuse people. Should we start referring to some other things as “Deck options”. Definitely no. That’s even more confusing. Should we move rename/edit description to a single shared screen? I think that’s a different topic and merits its own thread. For starters, one advantage is simply that the screen is shared and probably works better than native Android ones (albeit slower). Will there be someone doing another Svelte migration? I seriously doubt.
But this is wrong now, isn’t it? It’s the root of the original problem that started this thread.
Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s possible to keep the deck options as is while separating deck specific options from the preset options. It’s a single button away though, so a minor update to those tutorials would do.
They’re already confused by the current preset situation. At least, my suggestion makes sense and big changes aren’t new to Anki:
The old options can be accessed with a Shift+click, since it will take a while for add-ons to be updated to support the new screen. A new API is available, thanks to Henrik.
The deck description is now accessible via a button in the overview screen, instead of via the deck options.
To be honest, I didn’t understand the svelte stuff you were talking about .
Renaming makes more sense than moving things around. But again, different issue.
Dae doesn’t update his ones and most guides/tutorials are from 3rd parties we don’t control. And the links to deck options section of manual become obsolete, regardless of what we do.
Well, good luck convincing dae. I seriously doubt he’d agree to do this. Oh, and we might also break add-ons by trying to move things to a brand new screen.
Some of the screens (like Stats, Deck options, Card info) are written using Svelte which are shared across platforms. The goal is to move more and more screens to Svelte so that all the three Anki clients can share the same code. It’s probably a bit more work when you’re moving things around than when you’re just adding some new screens.
Seriously though, why we gotta complicate this? Let’s just agree on the preset manager now and maybe later we do something about changing things in deck options. I have seen things devolving into a 400-posts forum thread here and don’t want that to happen now. I think we ought to discuss a MVP around preset manager that can be shipped first, before discussing anything else.
I’ve only had time to skim this, so just a drive-by comment: the deck browsing screen will be moved to Svelte at one point, and I’d like for it to work on the mobile clients as well if possible, with perhaps some per-platform styling. At that time, it will be easy to implement things like a tooltip-on-hover that exposes info such as total cards in deck, preset, etc. Or have some toggle/option to reveal more info. Doing it with the current implementation is both cumbersome, and will lead to wasted work when it’s replaced.
I believe a preset manager has more utility than just showing a list of decks for every preset. And it’s a feature that has been asked a few times now (twice maybe? thrice if you include me).
@Anon_0000 Maybe you should create a seperate thread for it? Of course, only if you wish to still go after this. I think your proposal is great, just the “saving options to multiple presets” one is in need of tweaks. No issues with the other parts.
I’m not actively working on it and was hoping to get more feedback first.
Personally, I only use one deck with one preset. No other presets are in use, no other decks, no subdecks. So I largely rely on feedback of users that do use more than one deck and preset.
Not sure. My suggestions here were aimed at making deck/preset interactions more clear, so moving it to another thread feels a bit wrong. And there already is some feedback in this topic as well.
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