Non-SRS Custom scheduler? There's very little info about it

Anki Scheduling
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In short, I’ve been noticing something and would like a custom schedule that’s much simpler for initial learning, before then going over to SRS. I know there’s something sort of for it with the learning steps stuff, but if I’m honest, for people not deeply ingrained in Anki’s world, it’s all very convoluted and the terms are hard to follow. I found that after digging into it, it still just isn’t what I wanted, which is frustrating after how much time already sunk into just setting up a system for learning instead of just getting to the learning.

(I have something in mind, and have been thinking I’ll have to write a program from scratch that imports my Anki deck, to show cards in the preferred order. The information on custom scheduling is so sparse and difficult to figure out for somebody that doesn’t live in the Anki code, that without help it just looks easier to hack together a shoddy program from scratch. I’m writing in case I don’t have to do that, because I do not think it’s easy at all, the custom scheduler coding is just that hard to figure out for me, as the help pages redirect to a page that’s just code with little or no comments about what any of it means and it feels like trying to decode ancient tablets of a lost language. It feels like it’s not meant for people like me, and then I’m not sure if it’ll even be able to do what I’m looking for, so that’s why coding something new is where my head goes, even though just having a custom scheduler would save massive amounts of time.)

What I’ve been noticing is a lot of people try to use Anki/SRS right from the very start, which I think “works”, but SRS is not designed for that, it’s designed for long term retention. I think even for SRS there was stuff backing up the idea that learning it well to begin with helps in the numbers for retention later in (I’m not 100% sure, I just saw some charts and an overview on a youtube video, I don’t live and breathe this stuff.)

And for this initial learning (as opposed to trying to retain/remember what you’ve already learned), I’ve found the SRS algorithms not only less effective, but actively detrimental and getting in the way. It’s not that it doesn’t work or can’t work, obviously it can and does, it’s just that the idea here is optimization and it’s running counter to that for me.

No matter what settings I use in Anki, it’s determined to try to do it in some SRS way, which means it’s putting cards I’m trying to actively study off to another day or repeating the same subset overly while there’s other cards on the stack being ignored or just seen disproportionately less. The best I’ve found to deal with it is raising steps and using a filtered deck with “reschedule cards based on my answers” off and changing the numbers for Again, Hard, and Good, but it’s still not very effective. It’s still based on time, so it still “obsesses” over some cards and ignores others. Because it’s still trying to do something SRS-like, just on a smaller scale, I guess.

What I want to do is go over all the cards, and repeat the ones that were difficult more often, without delaying anything for a later time at all, and not getting hung up on a subset (not doing some of the cards at the same difficulty disproportionately). I came up with a very simple algorithm that would do what I’m looking for perfectly (I believe), but implementing it has just been too hard. Again, this isn’t a replacement for SRS and I’m not saying it’s “better” (even besides “to each their own”), this is for initial active learning before sending it to SRS for longer term retention. (I also plan to have immersion that includes the words between the two, where I think the real learning happens. This is all in support of that, with SRS being used after to retain it better.)

The algorithm I had in mind: I was thinking to set the “review sort order” to something that could be adjusted to do this (if that’s needed/works). Every card would have a value, starting at the same one (0, but it wouldn’t matter). When selecting Again/Hard/Good, it would simply add a flat amount to this value. At any given point, the next card to be shown would be the one with the lowest value (there would be a lot at equal value, and that’s ok, I don’t care which of the same value come first). It would be something like Good adds 1, hard adds 0.5, and Again adds 0.33.

So how it should play out is that on the first run, it will definitely go through EVERY card in the deck/stack. It doesn’t matter if it was marked as hard or easy, no card is ignored. Once every card has had some amount added to it, from there we see harder cards more often, but not ridiculously more often. The numbers could be adjusted, but the idea is that with 0.5 it’s just showing it twice and then its value has caught up, it’s not permanently marked in any way, from there it’s on equal ground to a card marked as Good once. The more cards are “Hard” or “Again”, the more they’ll be reviewed, but only until they catch up, and even if you hit “Again” 3 times in a row, it’s not resetting or making it more difficult, but simply moving on through the rest of the cards in the deck, not stuck on it. So we still go through all of the cards, and the difficult ones are repeated before getting to the rest again, without any cards effectively burying the others. Even if you always say it’s the hardest, we still continue through the entire deck, since no matter what difficulty is chosen, it’s ALWAYS only adding to the score/value.

This is how I originally did it with paper flashcards, and where I learned flashcards work really well for me. Going through the whole stack, and setting difficult ones aside to go over more, and then reshuffling back together to go over it all again, and see which ones are still difficult after that, to repeat (and review/refresh the rest overall). As you go, more and more become easier and need less repeating, so they are truly on equal ground and don’t need to be marked as less easy (that would be actively detrimental as you then focus on them at the cost of other cards, wasting time on frustratingly repeating easy cards just because you didn’t get it the first few times). It ends up with maybe 0 to a few cards that just aren’t sticking and those can be singled out for looking into more. I feel good about it when I can get through the whole deck and there’s only 0 or a few that are still a struggle. From there, you can go on to normal SRS to retain what you’ve learned, but I think this is better to learn it in the first place (for things where flashcards apply well).

There are other ways to do initial learning, it doesn’t have to be flashcards at all (SRS or not), and SRS can still be helpful after that. It just happens that I really like flashcards, but SRS is majorly getting in the way of that.

(I don’t want to do paper flashcards because it’s wasteful and slow to make, when there are multiple thousands of words I’ll need for 日本語 and its 漢字. And just putting up with the SRS interference would still get somebody there, just much more slowly, and it’s already such a long thing and I have other things I want to get to as well.)

So I guess my question is, can custom scheduler code do this? (Possibly with choosing a particular “review sort order” for something that can work as this value/score?) Would anyone more familiar be willing to help? There’s really little documentation on custom scheduling and what variables it can affect represent or do, and this seems on the fringe of what it’s meant for. (It’s still a different “schedule”, just not time or SRS-based.)

(Sorry if there’s some redundancy, I’m trying to be clear in case it helps, since I see literally nobody coming from this direction, which seems strange to me.)

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Anki is, by definition, a spaced-repetition program. This is inherent to the function, and design, of the thing.

Anki is a recall tool, not primarily a learning tool. This is a common misconception and, while it’s not impossible to learn things through brute force memorization, it is the case that it’s best used (in most cases) as an adjunct to other forms of learning.

Same as above. Anki is best thought of as a recall tool, rather than a learning tool (there are exceptions, of course). This really, in part, comes down to using a tool based on its utility. Using Anki for initial learning is, in many cases, not a super advisable idea. This is not a fault with the program so much as with the use-case.

This sounds a bit more like Quizlet, or similar. Arguably this can be approximated to some degree in Anki but I fear that, at least to some degree, what you’re describing runs at least a bit counter to the design of Anki.

I’m not sure I see how this is inherently different than SM-2 or FSRS, tbh. Cards are not inherently ignored, and you can easily decide on settings such that you go through every card in a deck, or subdeck. This is decided by deck settings, and very much something that can be set up.

From what you’ve described, it sounds like you want specific learning/re-learning steps and a max interval of 1 day, or something akin to that. There’s no special custom scheduler needed for that.

Round peg square hole, I fear.

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If you know of settings that would achieve the same result, that would be great. However, I have not found it “easy” at all, or even possible. If it were easy, I wouldn’t come to posting in such depth about it or have it being called “round peg, square hole” - I’d just use those settings and that would be that.

I know the SRS algorithms don’t “ignore” in a strictly technical sense, but every set of settings I’ve tried has always repeated cards before going through the entire deck. Even if you set every card to Easy, they’re sent off so far ahead that other cards come up again before they do. If you tell it harder things, they come up sooner - it’s by design, after all.

I don’t know how to say it more clearly that I already did (on how this algorithm is different), I’m backspacing where I tried to clarify, but I feel like I’m just repeating. I’m pretty sure, designed for it or not, the custom scheduler could be used for this. But it’s beyond me, so I guess I’ll code something from scratch. :frowning:

Edit: I had looked for alternatives too, and I just checked again what the issue with Quizlet was, and it’s that there’s no way to mark cards as harder to go over them more. You just have to repeat the ENTIRE deck, every time, which is extremely inefficient.

Outside of coding something, the best bet I’ve found is using colors and just doing it all manually, but for the amount of cards I was thinking to go over, I’d rather have something less tedious set up. That’s a lot of extra button pressing, and it has to interrupt between each runthrough of a deck, disturbing the flow when trying to learn.

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I think I have a rough idea of what you’re hoping to accomplish, but if you can give more specifics it might make it easier to give some recommendations.

Again, it might be easier to give recommendations if I know what you’re hoping to achieve. But otherwise this is pretty normal behavior for Anki interval-setting.

I will admit it’s not clear to me for what, exactly, you would need a custom scheduler tbh. Perhaps I’m missing something.

You mentioned not wanting to repeat cards before going through the entire deck, but then also mention disliking that Quizlet has you repeat the entire deck. This seems somewhat confusing from my perspective, though I’m sure we’re just missing some details.

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Well, the idea is to go through the entire deck on the first run through (without repeats), but then after that repeating the ones that were difficult 1-2 times (depending on difficulty), before continuing to another full run through the whole deck. Cards that are harder would continue to come up more often (IF marked as hard), but not extremely so (which has always been my experience with SRS in Anki and other apps online). They would not have some permanent issue with ease being set high or low, once they had the extra attention they would be equal with any other card, as they should be since at that point they may be as easy as any other. If they aren’t, they can be marked hard again, and get a small FLAT amount of extra study, as needed.

For example, I was using Skritter in a way it’s not meant to be used too (different exercise), trying to go over every kanji one time just for practice writing and familiarity with kanji, to recognize the components. It has a great drawing/writing system, but it insists on SRS, so I had to really finagle it to get one pass through everything without it going back and obsessively trying to show the same like 20 or so cards (out of hundreds). I came to realize SRS is the cause of it, it’s simply trying to do something else.

(By the way, that was extremely helpful practice for telling kanji apart better, but that’s another story. [They can look like blobs of overlaid lines when somebody is new to them, especially with small fonts.] Unfortunately it’s a paid app and takes some understanding and tedium to get it to work that way.)

With SRS/Anki, if you mark a hard as hard when it was already hard, especially multiple times, it has consequences and can be difficult/annoying to recover from, as seen with discussions about “ease hell”. I just want an extra review or two, and it should be coming up equally along with all the cards that were marked Good.

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For SM2 you can define the penalty for various answer choices in deck settings:

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For example, you can set it up such that answering ‘hard’ or ‘again’ have varying levels of penalty (and, therefore, impact on resulting intervals and thus review frequency).

It’s also probably worth noting that there is no ‘ease hell’ with the introduction of FSRS.

From the sound of it, to some degree you’re wanting to control the algorithm’s results rather than allowing it to define when it thinks you should see cards. While perhaps not entirely advisable, you can likely tinker with the settings to achieve what you want.

Nothing about what you’ve described seems impossible, tbh, just that you seem set on some pretty specific results/outcomes which may require finagling the algorithm and settings to arrive at what you want.

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The ease can’t be set to 1, which seemed to be what I’d want (not sure). None of the options seem to have only a flat effect, they seem to be very multiplicative/exponential. It’s been a while since I was trying to make it work.

It may seem specific, but I really just want something where it’s not feeling like it’s obsessing on certain cards at the expense of others, which I’m sure it doesn’t feel like for a lot of people, but going over cards needlessly really slows down a process that itself will already take years. Extra reviews of easy cards is annoying on top of being wasteful of time, and these settings are difficult to figure out for somebody not living around them and their terminology.

There’s also at least a couple (maybe more) gotchyas in Anki where things don’t work how one would expect without inside knowledge. I think there was something about new and hard interval that were more different than the names make it seem, in how they’re handled (the effect they have on/in the formula). And the difference between when a card is in review or in learning steps, and what features (like filtered decks and custom study) do or don’t work together with various other things. It’s hard to keep track of, and I was running into issues where what I was trying to do might’ve worked but wouldn’t because some thing or another didn’t apply to one mode or another.

So yeah, there may be some way of doing it, maybe not, it’s hard to tell, and it seems like it’d be difficult to figure out even for somebody more experienced, not to mention me even though I’ve looked into it for days by now, with coding background, not to mention for an average person who just wants to learn a language without all this convolution.

It’s such a simple idea, too. In middle school, I just wrote on two sides of paper and moved cards to a different stack if they were difficult, review them, and shuffle them back in to see what’s still hard. I just don’t want to do that for multiple thousands of cards. (Making physical cards)

Sorry for a bit of venting, it’s just that this seems like the most simple, straight-forward, first-thought on how to approach it kind of idea, and apparently nobody has thought of putting something together for it, even though it’s how a lot of people misuse Anki for initial learning when starting out, and have to have it explained to them to use the Again, Hard, Good, Easy buttons differently than they were expecting. Most people don’t seem to even make a distinction between initial learning and retention, and go straight to using Anki for initial learning.

To think I’m the odd one out, looking like I’m doing something weird, is just… very surprising to me. Anyways, I think I’ve found a way to do what I’m looking for with OpenOffice Calc of all things, so I guess I’ll look into that for now. (In case there’s somebody finding this that might be interested, I guess.)

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Can you use filtered decks?

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It’s been the closest I could get (filtered decks), disabling “Reschedule cards based on my answers in this deck” and adjusting the times, but I was having trouble figuring out times that work. For example if it’s 1 minute, then that card will still repeat after 1 minute, even before getting through the rest of the cards. Or sometimes if set too high, the card just won’t appear at all, because it’s waiting for another day (not sure about with filtered decks on that one).

I forget the specifics, but some of the options in Anki apparently didn’t apply to filtered decks, where it could have solved things. I was trying so many different things, I just ran into a roadblock and tried a different angle a few times, I didn’t keep track of what the holdup was each time. (I didn’t plan on posting about it)

It might work just using “Easy” and having easy cards removed from the deck, going over what’s left, and manually reshuffling them back in, but it’s a bit awkward and tedious. The other idea was having a hotkey to mark things as a certain color tag, and sorting it out that way manually, which seems like even more doing.

If it was just a few hundred or like a thousand cards, I’d probably do that, but there’s going to be 10-20k+ cards, and at this point I’ve been at it so long, maybe I’m a bit overinvested in figuring out something more optimal and with less manual steps.

Although maybe it could be refined to an Autohotkey script… Even then, it’s reduced to only “Easy” and repeat (any other button), losing the ability to separate hard and really hard. But it could work well enough.

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Yes, sorry I didn’t read your post fully. Appreciate you explaining things to me again even when you didn’t have to.

You can make a post in Suggestions if you think it’ll be worthwhile effort to change something.

Have you tried working with learn ahead limit? What it does is allow you to skip a delay if the delay is equal or shorter than the limit and you’ve run out of other cards to study. My idea would be setting the delay for Easy to something reasonably high like 30 minutes and using a learn ahead limit of 30 minutes.

Can you see if the learn ahead limit also work in filtered decks? If not, we can make a post in Suggestions.

Another idea that will work for the mobile clients. I don’t think desktop has a similar feature. If you have a Android device, you can check the previewer in Browser.

The powerful thing about it is that it can show you all the cards appearing right now in the screen. Plus, it shows cards in the order you’ve configured for the browser.

The negative is, it’s not really considered reviewing and there will be no review logs in your card info.

How I think the workflow would be is, you search is:new in the browser. It shows you all the new cards. Now you set a display order you like from the overflow menu. From the same menu, click Preview. There is a icon on top that either shows a ? or a !. You want it to be set to ? so that it shows the questions.

It’s intuitive from here, you click the buttons on bottom to move through the stack of cards. It shows you the question first and then the answer. If you find anything hard, you can flag it easily from the option on top. After going through everything, now you search the flagged cards and go through them again.

It almost works like the way you used to study your paper flashcards.

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Tbh, I’m not sure this appears to be simple, or straight-forward, or necessarily even first-thought (at least from my perspective). There’s clearly a very specific vision you have for how the algorithm ought to behave, but it doesn’t seem inevitably simple, or straightforward, to my eyes. That’s not meant to be unkind, just an observation from the other side of the table.

I think, at the end of the day, much of the time you mention having spent would be saved by turning on FSRS and letting the algorithm do what it does. If your goal is to save on time spent it would certainly be orders of magnitude more helpful to do that. That’s not meant to sound dismissive, and I do hope to be helpful here. :slight_smile:

In contrast, if your goal is, from the sound of it, to dictate how the algorithm behaves it may require some diligent effort/s (and necessarily come at the cost of some time).

But, respectfully, some of this does strike me as reinventing the wheel a bit. Much of the ‘all this convolution’ you mention seems to stem from the desire to impose specific behaviors onto the software, ultimately.

Smallest possible convolution: turn on FSRS, set desired retention: simple, straight-forward, (more) time-efficient.

In any case, I hope you end up arriving at what you want. :slight_smile:

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I like the ideas! I haven’t played with it, I’m looking into it. I’m not sure if it’s better than the filtered deck and Easy button. As far as reviews being recorded, I’m not worried about it at all, because this is meant to be separate from the retention part, just for learning to begin with, which could be many other activities and just happens to also be flashcards here. (ie. It might be better for the records to start clean once starting SRS proper. I think that’s also how it works with learning steps, which I think have a similar goal in mind.)

Also I am wanting to stay on PC, but ideas are still great!

To repeat: I’m sure FSRS would be great for long term retention, and I still plan on using it for that. But FSRS is not a replacement, or better, for what I’m trying to do here, for initial learning. It’s obvious I could have saved time with just going with something else, I said similar myself, but if I was doing that, FSRS would still be very low on my list.

I would also disagree that it would save time overall using a less effective/fitting method just because the initial setup is faster, considering the sheer amount to be studied. It may save time overall using other methods though, like some already mentioned or that I’m now looking into. Honestly, even if not, I’d rather spent a bit more time on the setup to lessen the amount of boring tedium and repetition, there’s already going to be a lot of that.

Plus, if something is figured out, it could be useful to others, too. A lot of people don’t consider these things (initial learning is different from retention, SRS is designed and optimized for retention, not driving in a lot of information quickly in the first place) and use Anki very inefficiently, some even quitting after sinking a lot of time into what they’re studying.

Again, this isn’t a competition. Just “driving in a lot of information quickly” is how you forget things not long after - but it’s also how you get better retention from grinding it in better to begin with, before transitioning over to longer term retention methods, like (F)SRS. It’s the difference between having a solid foundation and then remembering it, versus just jumping straight to trying to remember something you’ve barely understood or haven’t learned yet.

As to how it wouldn’t seem simple, I can’t say much there. It’s a pretty brute force, direct method: “Go over cards, see which are difficult. Do those more. Repeat to see what’s still difficult.” Surely I’m not the first to come up with it. I just came up with (a very simple, basic) algorithm that would do just that. And it doesn’t have to be exactly it, but compared to SRS, the focus is on what card comes next in a short term, immediate study session. Not when, not trying to push cards out to the future.

I just implemented it in spreadsheets. It’s not pretty, but it’s one way to do it. Not sure if that’s what I’ll be going with. Anyways, no need to worry, I’ll figure something out. There’s a bit to try here.

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How are you determining that FSRS would be less effective than the algorithm behavior you hope to achieve?

As a counter-point: if FSRS is better at predicting forgetting curve/s it would very much be more effective, and more time-efficient, for sure.

Lol, for sure I think we’ve all been there.

For sure your point has some validity in that short-term learning is a limitation. As I understand it this was traditionally solved with defined, static, learning/re-learning steps though now is also being integrated into dynamic steps in FSRS5.

Others will know better what the structural issues are that underlie that issue but I guess I’m unclear what your reasoning is in presuming that the interval-behavior you’re describing will necessarily be an improvement? I’m curious

It’s definitely fair to discern between blind, or brute-force, recall and familiarized recall. That’s an known issue for various users depending on approach and context (as, I think, at least to some degree, is probably inherent).

In any case, happy to hear what you come up with and what you land on. Always something to learn, ultimately.

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The only unique thing you seem to be proposing is going through the deck uninterrupted. Yes, Preview in the Browse window is the way to introduce the information before a formal study session.

Pretty much everything else you can set with appropriate-length steps, and the learn-ahead limit – but only if you’re willing to be flexible. If you’re not (which is your choice), you’ll want to use Filtered decks to draw strict boundaries between different phases of your study.

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More learning steps are the answer to it, I just don’t find them a great answer, especially because I’m trying to focus specifically on the initial learning, then do immersion, then optionally do SRS. Learning steps are more like SRS with a side of initial learning almost as an afterthought. It seamlessly goes into SRS, it seems hard to tell how many steps in it is, when it’s actually transitioned, and it doesn’t seem like it adjusts well to how difficult the cards were. I suppose it’ll stay in learning steps as long as you say it’s difficult before they’re up, but you have to have them set high enough so they don’t just turn into review cards, and then it may be easy and ready to go long before it gets there, and you’re doing extra steps on it that you don’t need to. It’s not unworkable, it just doesn’t feel as good. If I mark some cards in learning phase as difficult and not others, I believe the difficult ones won’t come up more often still, except for if the other ones break out of learning steps. Which they do on their own, and at that point I’d really just rather use filtered decks and manually eject them with the Easy button.

But I want to go over them more than that, so I’d have to reshuffle them back in, which again is doable, it’s just another case of making do with what’s there. It’s “good enough”, but it’s not really great. Anki seems to have no competition as far as flashcards, which shoehorns people into using SRS flashcards and I just don’t see much in the way of normal, non-SRS flashcards, so I was trying to use the nice features in Anki for that. I hadn’t realized at first how heavily ingrained the SRS is, but the custom scheduler seemed like in theory it could do what I was going for, but it’s too hard to figure out.

It’s hard to put into words exactly what else is the issue, it just feels very frustrating every time I go to study cards with what it chooses to put up next. “I just did that card 2-3 cards ago, why is it showing up again already, when there’s a whole deck of cards it could be choosing from? Why are these other ones not coming up at all, while these are coming up repeatedly, even if I power through them?” The settings are supposed to address it but in my experience they just haven’t been. Other times it’s finding out that it’s sent the card off to another day or week or month or year (especially in the case of FSRS, which if you’re not careful, can end up with cards set to be reviewed in literally over 100 years). You have to be careful/aware of what you’re doing, it’s not as “open and just go” as people often think.

Some of that won’t come up with proper settings or when still in learning steps, but after all the work of figuring Anki out (to the degree that I have), it’s pretty unrewarding to be stuck with just making do with something that “kind of works”, and when it’s going to be so much to keep studying, when I already feel like there’s a time-debt. Learning a language is a secondary thing to begin with, I don’t want it to be like the hundreds of youtube videos talking about how they learned, where they say it’s taken them literally years of doing 8+ hours daily to get where they are, and they’re just barely fluent, but still not at native level (when they’re not making videos lying about having learned it in 2 weeks or something crazy). I’ve seen a bunch of these videos, various strategies, explanations of SRS and where it came from, and saw flaws and room for improvement. Most of them barely understand the basic options of Anki, and brute forced their way through with sheer obsession (a word that comes up in a lot of the videos).

It’s going to take time, you can’t get around that entirely, but when there’s something feeling obviously frustrating holding me back, like it repeats a card for the 5th time after only going through like 7 unique cards, in a deck of 50-100, while others sit at the end of the stack not coming up, even though I have settings like 9999 cards/day and “new cards ignore review limit”, and have messed around with learning steps, settings under “advanced” after looking up what each is, custom study, and filtered decks - I can’t help but feel like there has to be a better way, which I’m inclined to look for even if that weren’t the case, but especially when it’s so frustrating, and seems like such a simple thing that nobody but me cares about.

But I feel like with regular people that don’t understand these algorithms and just want to learn a language or something, they’re often expecting something other than what Anki turns out to be, but they try to use it like it’s what they (and I) imagined it was anyways, until somebody tells them not to use certain buttons or to use them in a particular way, like you have to game the system instead of just honestly answering - “Hard? Easy?”

It’s not that it’s so crazy bad, it’s more that it’s so bizarre how difficult it is to do such a simple thing, that once realizing the possibility, I assembled in a spreadsheet program within 10-15 minutes. But not in Anki, a program made for flashcards, in days of obsessing with it and trying in various ways, just anything that doesn’t have these annoying repeats or pushing cards into the future, or not getting to the ones in the back of the deck until others have shown up repeatedly and have been gone over excessively when I already had them down long before.

So… it works, and it’s hard to scientifically sit down and give some report on exactly why it’s not as ideal as it could be, but the idea of having to put up with the needless redundancy of going over the same cards so much when I already get the idea, across a large bulk of cards I’m going to have to do, is just daunting. Besides the extra time it would take, I just get (perhaps unreasonably, sure) really frustrated when it keeps showing cards I don’t feel like it makes sense to show, that aren’t doing anything for me but making me take extra steps just to get to the real cards - and then that “needless” card comes up for the 3rd time in a row before I even got through 30% of the deck. And I just close it and look for what’s wrong, because it’s a long journey to have such a bumpy road the whole way there.

I feel like everyone wants to say “you just need to get the settings right”, but I haven’t been able to figure it out after messing with it probably a lot more than the average (especially non-technical) user. It always seems to run into one of these issues, or take extra manual steps.

But that’s fine, I can script the manual steps if nothing else, or use spreadsheets as a replacement for Anki (lol). I might just code something up anyways for practice, and import Anki decks, made through addons + browser extensions.

Just to put it out there, here’s the idea with spreadsheets:

There’s columns for front, back, whatever else for the card you want, a column for “=RAND()” (they’ll be random numbers every time it updates, which sorting counts as) and a column for the score/value for the card to sort by, where they all start at 0. So we sort by the score first, then the random column, ascending, and the top-most one will always be the lowest score. Just add (0.33 / 0.5 / 1) or for easier typing (1 / 1.5 / 3), or adjust however, based on the difficulty, and when it’s sorted again it automatically works out. To sort less, all of the ones at the same score value can be done first, it works out the same (aside from the random number re-randomizing). So enter a score, update (sort again), repeat. Maybe make a macro for that part.

From there it’s just prettying it up, what little a spreadsheet can. To separate the top-most from the rest on the list, you can make the row larger to make a gap, and make them all top-aligned so it shows at the top of the row. If it’s a wide screen, you can have the front and backs of cards more on the left and right apart from each other, so you don’t see them at the same time.

It’s jank, but not terribly more than what I’ve had with Anki. Still, I’ll probably just use filtered decks with Autohotkey to make a macro to pull the cards back together after going through and hitting Easy on a bunch of them and repeating the remaining ones till they feel better, to go over the rest and see what hasn’t stuck yet.

But I might make something poorly coded, where the easy part will be the card selection, and the hard part will be adding in the parts Anki already does (the UI and importing).

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If somebody was actually doing this: (Can ignore otherwise)
“alt, D, S” brings up sort, do it with nothing selected and it gets it all properly, and it remembers the settings so after sorting it the first time you don’t have to check, just hit enter. Easy to macro, too (at least the hotkeys, idk anything about spreadsheet macros, but those could be relevant too). Also super easy to add words/“cards”. Up to you to not look at the answer, put it further away, or hide it somehow. I’d also have a macro for adding +1 to the end of the cell (ie. it’d end up looking like “=0+1.5+3” after 2 times getting to it)

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I’m not an expert with the custom scheduler, but maybe someone else here is. Would something along these lines work?

if (!states.current.custom_data) {
    states.current.custom_data = "0";
}
let currentScore = parseFloat(states.current.custom_data);
const increments = {
    again: 0.33,
    hard: 0.5,
    good: 1,
    easy: 1
};
if (states.again) {
    states.again.custom_data = (currentScore + increments.again).toString();
}
if (states.hard) {
    states.hard.custom_data = (currentScore + increments.hard).toString();
}
if (states.good) {
    states.good.custom_data = (currentScore + increments.good).toString();
}
if (states.easy) {
    states.easy.custom_data = (currentScore + increments.easy).toString();
}

Then studying with a filtered deck sorted by the new score

ORDER BY customData ASC
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17

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