The Browse window allows you to search through your cards and notes, and edit them. It is opened by clicking Browse in the main window, or by pressing b. It is comprised of three sections: the sidebar on the left, the card list on the top right, and the current note on the bottom right. By positioning the mouse between two sections, it is possible to click and drag to expand one section and shrink the other.
The sidebar on the left allows quick access to common search terms. Clicking on an item will search for it.
You can hold down Ctrl (Command on Mac) while clicking in order to append
the clicked item to the current search with an AND condition, instead of
starting a new search. If you wanted to show learning cards that were
also in the German deck for instance, you could click on "Learning",
then Ctrl+click on "German".
You can hold down Shift to create an OR search instead of an AND. For
example, you could click one deck, then Shift-click another to show
cards from either of the decks in the same view.
You can hold down Alt (Option on Mac) in order to reverse the search
(prepend a -) – for instance, to show all cards in a current deck that
do not have a certain tag. Alt/Option can be combined with either Ctrl
or Shift (e.g., Ctrl-Alt-clicking will result in adding a new search
term that is negated).
To remove tags that are not used by any notes, use Tools > Check Database from the main window.
Above the card list is a search box. You can type in various things there to search for cards. For information on the search syntax, see Searching.
The card list displays cards that match the current search.
The columns are configurable: right click on one (or ctrl+click on a Mac) to choose which columns you’d like to see. You can drag columns to reorder them. Clicking on a column will sort by that column; click again to reverse the sort order. Not all columns can be sorted on.
The due column behaves differently for different types of cards. New cards show a number rather than a due date, which indicates the order the new cards will be presented in. Cards in (re)learning and reviews will both show a due date, but when sorting they are first grouped by type and then sorted by date.
The "edited" and "changed" columns sound the same but track different things. "Edited" tracks the last time changes were made to the note (e.g., when the content of a field was edited), while "changed" tracks the last time changes were made to the card (e.g., when you reviewed the card and the review history and interval were updated).
When you click on a card, its note will be shown in the bottom section. If you drag the mouse or hold ctrl or command to select multiple cards, the editor will be temporarily hidden. Various operations (such as changing the deck) can operate on multiple cards at once.
The background color will change depending on the card. Marked cards are a shade of purple. Suspended cards are a shade of yellow. For more information about marked and suspended cards, see Editing and More.
One of the available columns is called the Sort Field. Anki allows you to choose one field from each type of note to be used for sorting. You can change the sort field by clicking Fields in the current note section.
The question and answer columns display what you’d see on the question and answer while reviewing, except the answer column will strip the question part for clarity. You can also choose a custom format in the card type editor instead of showing what would be seen during review.
The bottom right area displays the currently selected card’s note. For more information about cards and notes, see Getting Started. For more information on formatting buttons, see Editing.
You can see a preview of what the currently selected card would look like when reviewing by clicking the Preview button next to the search box. Note that this will not display any type answer fields on your cards, which makes it easier to preview cards quickly.
Right clicking on selected cards in the card list shows up a menu of actions you can perform on those cards:
Info shows various information about the currently selected card, including its review history. For more information, see Card Info.
Toggle Mark and Toggle Suspend are documented in editing and more.
Change Deck allows you to move cards to a different deck. Cards can be placed in different decks, so if you want to move all cards in a note, you should first use Edit > Select Notes to select all cards, right click on selected cards and then click Change Deck.
Add Tags and Remove Tags allow you to add or remove tags from notes in bulk. To remove unused tags from sidebar, start from the main window, click Tools in the menu bar and click Check Database.
Delete removes the selected card(s) and their notes. It is not possible to remove individual cards, as individual cards are controlled by the templates.
To replace text in selected notes, you can either:
-
Right click on selected notes in the card list, and click Find and Replace.
-
In the Browser window, click Notes in the menu bar and click Find and Replace.
The regular expression option allows you to perform complex replacements. For example, given the following text in a field:
<img src="pic.jpg" />
Searching for:
<img src="(.+?)" />
and on Anki 2.1.28, replacing with:
${1}
on older Anki versions, replacing with:
\1
Will change the card to:
pic.jpg
A full discussion on regular expressions is outside the scope of this document. There are a number of syntax guides available on the web:
- For Anki 2.1.28+, see https://docs.rs/regex/1.3.9/regex/#syntax.
- For older Anki versions, see http://docs.python.org/library/re.html.
You can use the Notes > Find Duplicates option to search for notes that have the same content. When you open the window, Anki will look at all of your note types and present a list of all possible fields. If you want to look for duplicates in the Back field, you’d select it from the list and then click Search.
By default, it will search in all note types that have the field you provided. This differs from the duplicate check when you add cards manually, which is limited to a single note type.
The Optional filter text box allows you to narrow down where Anki will look for duplicates. If you only want to search for duplicates in the "French Vocab" and "French Verbs" note types, you would enter:
note:'french vocab' or note:'french verbs'
Or you might want to look only for duplicates in a particular deck, so you could use:
deck:'myDeck'
The search syntax is the same as used when searching in the browser. For more information, see Searching.
You can click one of the links in the search results list to display the duplicate notes in that set. If the search brings up a large number of duplicates, you may wish to instead click the Tag Duplicates button, which will tag all matching notes with duplicate. You can then search for this tag in the browser and handle them all from the same screen.
Some other items in the menus:
Reschedule allows you to move cards to the end of the new card queue, or reschedule them as a review card on a given date. The second option is useful if you have imported already-learnt material, and you want to start it off with higher initial intervals. For example, choosing 60 and 90 will give all the imported cards an initial interval of 2 to 3 months.
The card’s revision history is not cleared when rescheduling: rescheduling changes the current state of a card, but not its history. If you want to hide the history, you will need to export your notes as a text file, delete the notes, and then import the text file again, creating new notes.
Reposition allows you to change the order new cards will appear in. You can find out the existing positions by enabling the due column, as described in the card list section above. If you run the reposition command when multiple cards are selected, it will apply increasing numbers to each card in turn. By default the number increases by one for each card, but this can be adjusted by changing the "step" setting. The Shift position of existing cards option allows you to insert cards between currently existing ones, pushing the currently existing ones apart. For instance, if you have five cards and you want to move 3, 4, and 5 between 1 and 2, selecting this setting would cause the cards to end up in the order 1, 3, 4, 5, 2. By contrast, if you turn this option off, 1 and 2 will get the same position number (and it will thus be unpredictable which of the cards with the same number comes up first).
Change Note Type allows you to convert the selected notes from one type to another. For example, imagine you have a Russian note type and a Computer note type, and you accidentally added some computer-related text into a Russian note. You can use this option to fix that mistake. The scheduling of cards is not affected.
Select Notes takes the currently selected cards, finds their notes, and then selects all cards of those notes. If your notes have only one card, this does nothing.
The Go menu exists to provide keyboard shortcuts to jump to various parts of the browser, and to go up and down the card list.