As a non-native English speaker studying English words and expressions, I’d really like colors in the Browser window to help me learn and trace better. The seven colors (Flags) are useful, but there’s a problem: for example; if I want to assign the red flag to a card as “hard” and also use another color to mark it as verbs or active vocabulary, I can’t apply a second color at the same time. This limitation makes things harder.
I think it would be great if there were four or five additional columns where we could assign a color to each entry—independent of the existing Flags colors. That way, a single note could have multiple colors at once, with each color representing a user-defined category. I know about tags, and they’re helpful, but this idea would also be very practical and would remove the restriction of having only one color per card.
My suggestion is to add four or six new columns where you can click next to an entry and choose a color—maybe shown as small colored circles.
If you primarily use desktop and aren’t bothered by not being able to see or add the custom flags on mobile, then this ought to work for your use case well.
Thanks again for the great add-on you recommended — it’s really useful. And yes, I mostly use the Anki desktop version. But I think my original question wasn’t very clear.
What I’d like is the ability to assign more than one color to a card at the same time. For example, for the word acne, I want to use Anki’s default green flag and label it “easy,” but I’d also like a second color to show that it’s a noun. And for the expression to bounce ideas off (someone), I want to use the red flag and mark it as “hard,” while giving it another color to indicate that it’s a verb phrase.
In short, I’d like two different colors to appear simultaneously for a card in both the Browser window and the Cards view. I imagine this would require additional columns that let you click next to a card and choose a color icon, instead of using a full-width color bar (since the flag colors already fill that space). Even though the default flags already color the entire row, I’m looking for a way to add extra colors that represent my own categories (in my case: verb, noun, phrase, etc.).
This might make the Browser window look a bit crowded, but I still think it would be a useful feature. I don’t know whether Anki will ever add something like this, so since last night I’ve started creating and organizing new tags to help me track my cards more quickly and in more detail.
I’ve use the custom flag addon myself and pondered what it would take to allow multiple flag values per card.
Currently each custom flag corresponds to a single number, e.g. 5, which is then stored in the card custom data as cf=5. To store multiple flags you’d convert the cf value to a binary and have the position of the 1s denote the flags. So, say you’ve got flags 1, 3 and 7 enabled, the custom data value would be cf=1000101. The 100 byte size limit of custom data would limit the maximum number of flags to less than 100 (and it wouldn’t be good to max out the custom data either). It’d be best to limit the amount of space taken in custom data, so the binary could be converted to decimal (cf=1000101 becomes cf=138) to be able to encode 100 flags in ~30 bytes leaving room for other custom data too.
The UI side would be the bigger hassle to code, I bet. Displaying multiple background colors in the card browser seems difficult. I don’t have experience in modifying the Anki webviews, so I don’t know what that would require exactly.
The card browser table isn’t created with a webview anyways as far as I can tell. It might get ported in the future though.
Just out of interest: what advantages do flags have anyways? Why not use tags, which do not have such a limit and work on all clients? Is the visual in the card browser (or maybe the visual flag on the card itself) the reason why you want this?
Alternative: add a field to your note types and edit the question/answer browser appearance and your templates to show this field. Then you can fill it with emojis to indicate whatever you want, like “” for a “hard noun” and “” for an “easy preposition”.
I would certainly recommend using tags rather than flags for this, though you may also be interested to read the Organizing Content section of the Anki manual. I think tags or even fields might be closer to what you’re looking for within your current workflow.
Of special interest, though: Anki automatically calculates “difficulty” of cards as you study them. That’s really the whole point of using a spaced repetition algorithm!
” for a “hard noun” and “
” for an “easy preposition”.