Set "Daily limits" separately from the other deck options

Anki Suggestions
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Now that 2.1.5b3 has reintroduced intermediate limits again, (a great feature that I’m sure will please many users, since working that way seems to be more intuitive for most people), I think separating the “Daily Limits” section from the rest of the Deck Options, would also help to make things still clearer for most users.

Actually, if you have this deck structure:

Geography (Deck Options Preset A)
- Unit 1 (Deck Options Preset A)
- Unit 2 (Deck Options Preset A)
- Unit 3 (Deck Options Preset A)

And you would just like to set different limits to subdecks (which is, btw a pretty common use case scenario):

  • Take 5 new cards from Unit 1
  • Take just 1 card from Unit 2
  • Don’t take any cards from Unit 3

You need to add three new presets (Options > Clone Preset > Change limits > Save Preset As) and assign them to the three different subdecks:

Geography (Deck Options Preset A)
- Unit 1 (Deck Options Preset B)
- Unit 2 (Deck Options Preset C)
- Unit 3 (Deck Options Preset D)

…which, besides being somewhat cumbersome, is IMO not very intuitive, especially for new users who just want to set different limits for each subdeck without having to deal with more complicated deck options and intimidate screens. The situation gets even worse with more complex deck / subdecks structures.

What I’m proposing here is being able to set deck limits in a deck basis, separately from the other deck options:
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This way in order to set different limits to Unit 1, 2, and 3 subdecks, all the user need to do is just set the desired limits directly in each deck and forget about creating four new whole deck options presets just for that.

I don’t know if I’m missing something or if this request would be easy / reasonable to implement, but maybe this small change would help to improve the usability of the program in an area that frequently raises questions and doubts in the forums.

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I think you are right. Being able to introduce different amounts of new cards per subject is one of the main motivations for having multiple decks. That is to say, limits are usually highly deck specific, and maintaining them is often more hindered than alleviated by presets.
In contrast, other deck settings are usually subject to personal preference, and differ from deck to deck than from user to user.
E.g. at some point I discovered that the default leech limit is far too high for my liking. A preset allowed me to quickly customise it for all decks at once. Or rather, it would have, hadn’t I had many different presets to allow for different daily limits.

However, changing this behaviour would surely not be without difficulties. Not only because of the required changes to the codebase and collections, but you also need to consider compatibility with older versions and other platforms.
Still, would love to see this one day!

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At first glance, the problems don’t seem insurmountable. For compatibility with older versions, we could keep the existing limits in the deck presets, and use them as before, except when a specific limit has been set for a specific deck. Older clients wouldn’t know about the per-deck limits, and would just use the preset’s settings instead.

It would require work to teach the scheduler how to use the limits, but the UI end may end up being the hardest part. If this is something we want integrated into the deck list screen rather than somewhere else, then at the least we should probably wait for the deck list screen to be reimplemented.

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