New study screen [Official thread]

[BrayanDSO]

The 2.23 version of AnkiDroid (currently in alpha) features a new and improved study screen. This thread is intended to serve as the official location for feedback about it.

Bugs should be reported on GitHub.

If you like it and want to further contribute with its development, you can donate to help us maintain the work .

Screenshots

New features and improvements

• Performance
  • It’s faster, lighter and more reliable
• Compatibility
  • It uses the same shared style and rendering mechanism of Anki and AnkiMobile
  • Now cards should work the same way among the platforms, which fixes persistence between front & back, and a lot of broken note types.
  • There are minor style changes that are a consequence of that, like margin changes and the coloring of play buttons in dark mode.
• Gestures
  • Compatible with buttons, controls, and other interactable elements in cards!
  • New multi-finger gestures
• Immersive mode
  • Better support for modern phones and newer Android versions
  • Added option to hide the system’s status bar, navigation bar or both
  • Added option to ignore the Display cutout
• Answer feedback
  • Replaced the dot-based answer feedback with new icons
  • Wrong answers are on the left, and the correct answers are on the right. That way, there is feedback about the answer without even looking at the indicator.
  • It also helps indirectly explaining to the user that ‘Hard’ is a correct answer, which is a broad confusion point in the community.
  • There’s also an option to disable it if you don’t want it.
• New Whiteboard
  • Custom brushes: you can save brushes with an specific color and size to easily re-use them in multiple cards
  • Set custom toolbar position
  • Ink and Stroke eraser modes
  • Better stylus support
• Reformulated visuals
  • It’s possible to restore the previous frame style, by changing it to the ˋBoxˋ option.
• Tablet/Foldable/Desktop dedicated design
• Toolbar
  • More intuitive action selection
  • Toolbar actions can be reordered
  • Toolbar actions scroll if they don’t fit the screen.
  • Added option to put it at the bottom of the screen
• Auto-advance
  • Fixed behavior of not following the deck configuration when going to a different deck in the study screen.
• Type-in answer
  • Improved support for the ˋHTMLˋ type-in input setting
• New ‘Browse’ and ‘Statistics’ commands
  • quickly open other screens while studying
• Hide ‘Hard’ and ‘Easy’ buttons setting

Changed/Missing features

• The card counts and timer are now in the toolbar
• Flag and mark icons are in the screen top corners, just like Anki and AnkiMobile
• As an accessibility setting, the answer button size can only be made bigger, not smaller.

Can be add-ons

Won’t be back as native features, but can be implemented as JavaScript add-ons by the community

• Show deck title
  • Also replaceable by adding ˋ{{Deck}}ˋ in the card template
• Show ETA
• Image Zoom
• Show large answer buttons
• Center align

Won’t be back

• Press back twice to go back/exit
  • A setting like that is made to mitigate navigation problems within the app, but it shouldn’t be necessary. If that’s your case, please report your issue so we can take a look
• Answer buttons position > Top
  • It is not ergonomic, and it is replaceable by gestures.
• (old) Text to Speech (TTS)
  • It was replaced a long time ago with the Anki Ecossystem TTS system, and marked with a deprecation warning. It’s time to go. We will provide a guide on how to migrate.

What will happen with the old study screen?

It won’t get any new features, and only critical issues will be fixed.

Our current intention is to only remove the old study screen when most of its deprecated features and behaviors are implemented as add-ons in the new study screen by the community, so it doesn’t interfere with the users’ workflow.

But that may happen sooner if maintaining it becomes unsustainable,

Please remember that AnkiDroid is a free and open-source app, made by volunteers in their scarce free time. Keeping two screens with the same functionality isn’t sustainable in the long term, so the old study screen will eventually be gone.

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Loved it? Any donation will help us improve even more the new study screen .

[ZornHadNoChoice]

Don’t forget the new JS API methods:

• Changing the background color of the reviewer.
• Getting the revlog of any card given its ID.

[spaspi]

I don’t see an option for the “reset card progress” button, is it coming back?

[ZornHadNoChoice]

That’s not an option in the old study screen either. You can still open the browser and reset there.

[BrayanDSO]

@ZornHadNoChoice

That’s not an option in the old study screen either.

It is. It’s under the Schedule menu option.

Forgot about that. I’ll implement it.

[amralsaleeh]

@BrayanDSO

Can be add-ons

Won’t be back as native features, but can be implemented as JavaScript add-ons by the community

• Show deck title
  • Also replaceable by adding ˋ{{Deck}}ˋ in the card template
• Show ETA
• Image Zoom
• Show large answer buttons
• Center align

Can I know how to enable the “Center align” option in the new study screen?

I tried doing it with CSS, but it did not work properly.

Does anyone know how to fix this?

[spaspi]

Regarding the new “Deck options” button:

I thought what it opened was the deck options for the card I just reviewed, so I made changes, then I finally realized after some time that was actually the options for the parent deck I clicked on for the study session.

Because the deck options screen doesn’t show which deck you’re modifying, it can be misleading.

Either the deck name needs to be shown, or the new study screen settings needs to be more descriptive of what this button does, or make it so that this button does change the options for the deck the card belongs to (I want this, it makes this button more useful.)

[BrayanDSO]

@spaspi

that was actually the options for the parent deck I clicked on for the study session.

that has been the behavior of the old and new study screens since their beginnings, so there’s nothing new here. The desktop does the same thing. Also, actually all the actions apply to the current card (besides the obvious “Previous card info” command), which is the expected behavior, and that hasn’t been a source of complaints until now.

@spaspi

Either the deck name needs to be shown

If you feel like that, some of the options are already described:

1. Use {{Deck}} on your templates
2. Keep using the old study screen until add-ons aren’t implemented.
3. Get used to the fact that the command applies to the current card and either use Undo or Browse if you want to go to the previous card

[Danika_Dakika]

@BrayanDSO

The desktop does the same thing.

Whenever the “current” deck and the card’s subdeck are different, desktop Anki gives you a choice of which Options preset you want to open –

– and it also shows you the deck name at the top of the Options window, which I don’t believe AnkiDroid does. That presents challenges for deck-specific settings.

[spaspi]

@BrayanDSO

1. Use {{Deck}} on your templates
   …
2. Get used to the fact that the command applies to the current card

This is not my problem. My complaint was the deck options command does not apply to the current card (belonging to a subdeck of a different preset), but rather the parent deck.
I was not aware it existed in the old study screen too. I didn’t know the old screen had this option.

[hannibal]

Hey, this is my first message on this forum since I only created the forum account to talk about this new study screen! Therefore I hope it’s fine to just reuse this existing thread instead of creating a new one.

First off, a huge thanks to the maintainers of this incredible project! I use the android app daily for many months now and I love the many options and customisations there are!

Now about the current topic at hand:

When opening anki today, I got greeted with the popup that told me about changelogs, and also about the new study screen.

I love experimenting with new stuff so I immediately headed to the options and enabled the main toggle in the new category.

After opening up a new deck to start a learning session, I noticed the design looks different, I Like that.

Thought, idk how ready this new option actually is as it seems to lack many alr existing features.

For me personally, my gestures are no longer working and the answer buttons show up even tho I have disabled them in other settings long ago.

This realisatiwon breaks my assumption that the new options inside the new study screen category are just supplementing to the existing settings in the other categories.

Since this doesn seem to be the case, and the new category only has 11 options (almost nothing compared to the 50+ options in the other categories, it feels like), this feels like a super early test version. Is this the case? Is this new feature just not yet ready for actual users and you want more early testers?

If not, I’m sad to say that I’m quite disappointed in the new option if this doesn’t support my habit of using anki droid.

Therefore I’ll disable the new feature for now again, so I can keep learning without the answe buttons and with my guesting controls.

I’m hopeful to read some clarifying responses and I’m happy to answer any follow up questions that might arise!

Thanks a lot again, a happy user

[BrayanDSO]

@hannibal

For me personally, my gestures are no longer working and the answer buttons show up even tho I have disabled them in other settings long ago.

Gestures work for everyone until now. Have you set them up correctly?

Disable Show answer buttons inside the New study screen section if you want to hide them.

Besides what’s already stated in the thread description, everything should be there. You need to be specific to what you think is missing.

[zdfur]

Hi, thank you for the development of new study screen, I like it!

The new study screen is missing two whiteboard features that I really like:

1. When you re-enable stylus writing (or re-enable whiteboard), it will display the pen strokes from before the stylus / whiteboard was disabled;
2. For any different deck, it can remember whether you enabled the whiteboard or not by default.

I would be very happy if these features (especially the first one) could be supported in the future. Thank you again for all your excellent work!

[hannibal]

@BrayanDSO

Gestures work for everyone until now. Have you set them up correctly?

Hey, thanks for the reply! Yes I have set up gestures correctly, months ago already. I use gestures all the time and now they still work fine, just when I enable the new study screen they don’t. If I disable the new study screen they start working again. I don’t see any additional settings related to gestures, so I assume the new study screen just reuses the existing gestures settings. But this doesn’t work for me.

Thanks for the tip to disable show answer buttons in the new category, overlooked it.

This is btw the problem with the design choice in the new category “new study screen “. think, it’s unclear why the show/hide answer buttons is a new toggle for the new view but the gestures still use the old settings. Wouldn’t it be better to either just reuse the existing options or add all options again in the new view, but not having this inconsistency where some options are taken over from other parts of the config (like gestures) while others needs to be set up twice (like show answer buttons)?

Thanks

[ap0]

Hi, I use clear whiteboard a lot but cannot find the button on Ankidroid

[Relative_Programming]

Hi, I really like the new aesthetics of the study screen along with it’s high configurability

However, there is one thing that keeps me from using ot: I would like to have an option to dock the whiteboard toolbar to the top, not overlaying the card content. Currently it displays on top of the card hiding text I can’t scroll to.

It would also be nice, if the toggle state of the whiteboard mode would persist across sessions, like the old one did. I’m using whiteboard mode for every card in a certain stack, so it would be convenient if it stays enabled.

[Relative_Programming]

Hi there, you can reach it when tapping on the eraser

[EbbDrop]

Hey, First off all I like the new study screen. It looks a lot more modern!

The new answer feedback icons are really nice but I think having them at the top again would be a lot nicer. With the old screen I never had to look down so my eyes where still in the right place for the next card. Now, if I want to be sure I pressed the right button I have to look down between every card. The icons on the right are also covered up by my thumb sometimes.

But like I said I like most of the redesign! Just a option the move the icons would be nice, Thanks

[ap0]

It would be great if I could make it more accessible instead of tapping twice and finding the button in the menu to erase the board.

Currently in the old version I have the erase board button directly on my toolbar.

[Thor]

Slowly responding when using gestures

I am always using gestures when I answer a card: Mostly ‘Touch right’ for ‘Answer easy’ and ‘swipe left’ for ‘Answer again’. Or ‘double touch’ for ‘suspend’.

The gestures work. But I noticed that the new study screen needs about 1,5 s to react after a gesture. The old study screen reacts immediately.

The buttons of the new study screen react also immediately.

Hardware: Tablet Samsung Galaxy A9 (small 9 inch tablet).

Would be great if it would be possible to make the new study screen react faster after a gesture.

BTW I like the new toolbar handling.

BTW Showing the current deck name with a very small font above the 3 left numbers would be great because it would not be necessary to change the layout of the card template. Because of the small font there should be enough room left for the toolbar symbols.