Proposal:
Currently, the only way approach a collection for study is by decks. This main “Decks” tab, I will call the deck viewer. I recommend adding another tab to view the collection via tags; a “tag viewer” area to approach studying.
- This tag viewer would list all the tags as pseudodecks in the hierarchy traditionally found in the browser.
- New/Learn/Due stats would be present.
- Only tags with unsuspended cards which are new/due would appear; tags without new/due cards and without buried cards would not appear.
- When a tag-based pseudodeck is opened for studying, if there are no cards remaining, it will prompt the user to unbury cards of that tag, like a normal deck would.
- The
gearicon for each pseudodeck would showhideandexport.Hidewould remove the tag from the tag viewer. Hidden tags from the tag viewer can be restored via a button which takes the place of theCreate Deckbutton.Exportwould export all the cards of that tag as a new, single deck and not using the traditional hierarchy found in the deck viewer. - Studying cards from this viewer would reschedule them normally.
- The
display orderof cards could follow a global option for this tag viewer tab to simplify settings, but alternatives can be explored for how to display the cards – I recommend against more complicated alternatives for a first version.
Motivation:
As decks get larger, they become harder to organize. Some decks have no fundamental way to organize the material, and so you just have a mega-deck with no subdecks. Tags are a superior way to organize cards, and solve this deck problem of rigid delineation. As I have seen Anki’s community grow, I see the community has generally settled on treating decks as a place to identify the origin of information. Having such a rich way of organizing information is underutilized when the deck viewer is the only way to approach studying a collection.
In the 2 most common user use cases of Anki, I see users manually suspending and unsuspending cards in the browser to control their studying to a more fine degree. This is because the deck viewer has no way to select that information directly. This is a challenging, slow process on mobile due to the great friction of the limited mobile UI and touch screen keyboard. For a more long term solution, advanced users implement the filtered deck option. The problems with that are first, the filtered decks cannot “share” cards; that is to say, only one filtered deck can hold a card, and filtered decks cannot be nested. So, advanced users have all their filtered decks empty, and when they want to study from such a deck, they rebuild it. Second, this unfortunately doesn’t reveal the important data such as “new, learn, and due” until it is built, and so viewing that information is a very tedious process of building and rebuilding. Furthermore, each filtered deck requires manual maintenance. So, third, when a tag or deck name is renamed, each filtered deck must manually be fixed.