Flagging notes is, for me, a crucial feature for grouping notes according to its relevance and other criteria. That’s why I wish it was possible for me to customize the flags, like adding more flags, renaming them, choosing their colors, etc.
I’d deeply appreciate if the Anki dev’s team considered turning it into reality!
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+1.
Renaming flags is already possible in the 2.1.45a version. Adding more flags would be really useful, for sure.
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For organising notes you should use tags. These are much more powerful, can represent hierarchy, are arbitrarily extentible and an arbitrary number of them can be active at the same time.
Flags only belong to a single card (not the whole note) and only one can be active per card. They aren’t meant to carry a lot of information and more useful as a kind of temporary reminder.
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+1
This. Flags are a tagging system for cards, instead of notes. So, they can perform a task that tags can’t. And this is why more powerful Flags would be something useful.
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True, but this task is very limited compared to tagging, because most of the important data is associated with notes, so there is less need to organise cards.
Of course, it’s always nice to have more powerful tools, but I wonder, what are your concrete use cases for changing flag colours, what do you use flags for and how many would you need?
I have to say up front that it’s not realistic that the number of flags will increase by a lot or that they will become non-exclusive in the near future due to the way they are implemented in Anki.
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Understood.
And how about if we could tag notes and cards? That would be another solution for the same problem, I think. Would it be possible or is it also a non realistic feature request?
I fear that’s even less realistic. Apart from the implementation details, I think having card and note tags would be utterly confusing for users and hard to represent suitably in the GUI.
I’d still be interested to know what this problem is. 
Thanks for the info. 
Basically, the tag system doesn’t work very well with clozed notes. If you have a lot of notes like this:
{{c1::Winston Churchill}} was born on {{c2::1874}} in {{c3::Oxfordshire}}
And you want to tag just the second card as “date_of_birth” (to create custom decks based on that particular tag, for example), essentially you can’t do it.
Another example:
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Thank you, now I remember that you’ve explained your use case before. The problem here seems to be that you can’t assign meaningful names to cloze templates, because all cards are created from the same one. I wonder if it would be possible to remedy this directly. Say for a given notetype the card “Cloze 1” could be labeled as “Date of Birth” and would also appear in the sidebar.
I can’t say whether this is practical, but hypothetically, would it solve your problem?
If the other two proponents of more powerful flags here have different use cases, I’d be interested to know them, too.
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If you find there’s a pattern to the cards you’re inputting, maybe it is better done using a regular note type. Cloze deletions are a timesaving device to allow you to quickly occlude existing freeform sentences; they are not intended for structured input.
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Not really, since my notes doesn’t really follow any pattern and I have thousands of them.
Knowing that these two FR are not realistic is enough for me, thanks for your time again!
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I use flags for two things (I usually use clozes, with multiple cards per note):
Usage 1:
-Orange flag: cards that I want to make a special review in the week before the exam.
-Red flag: cards that I also want to review right before the exam.
So, the week before the exam I make a Filtered deck with Orange+Red flag.
Usage 2: Cards that I want to edit. I use some premade decks, so I need to edit a lot of cards.
-Green flag: cards that I want to edit soon.
-Blue flag: cards that have relevant content, but it’s more like “maybe, someday, I will fix it”.
-Star: high priority cards that I want to edit as soon as I finish revising, or get in front of the PC.
For usage 2, I could use tags, but it’s way more convenient to use flags. For usage 1, it’s completely impossible to use tags, because it would unnecessarily inflate (probably triplicate) the number of cards to revise.
So, all my flags are taken, but I could easily use more flags, for other stuff. For example, when the problem is that I need to understand better the content of the card, so when I sit with my textbooks I can focus specifically on this kind of flag.
BR,
Thanks for sharing. As you said yourself, No. 2 is actually a tag job. Maybe it could be made easier to assign certain tags in the reviewer, or possibly there is an add-on for this?
Then you should have enough flags for your other uses, especially since there hopefully will be 3 more flags with the next release. (But that’s it, the space reserved for flags is now exhausted.)
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3 more flags is definitely enough for me.
I did a quick search now and yes, there are a some addons related to quicktagging. It seems a good option for someone who makes reviews on the PC.
Thanks!
That’s great!
Yes, for sure.
Well, maybe 3 more flags would be enough for me. But if this is not possible I totally understand!
Ok, I’ll try to explain it in a concise way.
I use Anki to study Law, which involves having to memorize a myriad of doctrine thesis, legislation, jurisprudence, deadlines, principles, classifications, and so on. So, in order to organize all this stuff in Anki in a way that make it quick and easy to find specific notes I came up with the following system:
- I customized the note types by creating a field where I put the general subject I’m studying (I try to organize it in away that resembles the table of contents of a textbook)
- I use the add-on “link Cards Notes and Preview them in extra window” to cross-reference cards when necessary.
- I tag the notes following one of these criteria: Legislation; Doctrine; Jurisprudence; Questions from previous exams (so I can tell what was the source of that information);
- I currently use flags to identify the cards that need to be rectified, as well as to identify which ones I find it hard to remember correctly.
Although I find this system to be quite efficient for having a big picture of my decks in a organized way, I often feel it’s incomplete when I have to deal with specific cards. The reason for this is that some cards store information that are way more important than information in other cards (e.g. I have to master them before I can understand other subjects; or they are recurrent on admission exams, etc.), hence the need to be able to use more flags to cherry-pick these cards (e.g. for review before the exam).
If it were possible, my flags would be something like this:
- Need to rectify;
- Hard to recall;
- Doctrine;
- Legislation;
- Jurisprudence;
- Deadlines;
- Classifications;
- Rule;
- Exception;
- Principles.
I’ll give you a practical example of what I’m trying to explain.
Let’s say I’m studying Tax Law, and there’s a topic in the textbook explaining the principle of pecunia non olet. Let’s have in mind that this principle is also relevant to Constitutional Law as well as to Finance Law, and that there are some relevant jurisprudence about it, as well as some legislation. So, I’d cross-reference the cards among these 3 fields of Law, tag the notes (Legislation, Doctrine, Jurisprudence or Questions), but I’d flag only the most important cards about this subject.
So if I want to review just the most important jurisprudence (e.g.) about the principles of Law, I just have to filter the correspondent flag (Principles) and tag (Jurisprudence). If I want to review the most important jurisprudence specifically about Tax Law, I just have to filter by the flag, by the tag and by the deck, but if I want to review specifically the most important jurisprudence cards from this principle, I filter by the flag, by the tag, by the custom subject field I mentioned before, and use the cross-reference links.
I hope I was successful in clarifying my point of view.
I tried to be concise but now I see I failed. Sorry.
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Thanks for sharing. It’s interesting for me to see because the subjects I study don’t have such complex structures.
From the list of things you would like to flag I can only really understand 1 and 2. Shouldn’t the other pieces of information be evident from the note (via tags) or the notetype and template?
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3 more flags would be amazing, thx
I feel like we are studying the exact same subjects, for the exact same purpose (concurso?), but I am not sure if I understand your system, my friend haha
I see that inside a note with lots of information there may be one that is a Deadline, and you may want to flag the corresponding card, so you make a special review only about Deadlines. The same for Exceptions. This makes sense.
But, I don’t see the reason for the flags 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10. Are your notes long to the point of including Doctrine, Legislation, Jurisprudence, etc, in the same note? Are you grabbing whole paragraphs from textbooks and making clozes? (I think this would actually be a good way to proceed, considering the volume of information we need to deal with)