What Do All The Categories Mean in the Browser?
When sorting cards in the Browse screen, within Anki, there are a lot of options available and not all of them may be immediately clear, or useful. This article hopes to give at least a basic primer as to what each of them means, what it might be useful for, and whether or not to worry too much about it.
Without further ado, let’s dive in:
- AnkiHub ID: this is a unique ID assigned to AnkiHub cards, for purposes of identification, updates, and general tracking.
- AnkiHub: Modified After Sync: this field, perhaps obviously, informs whether or not the card has been modified since your last sync.
- AnkiHub: Updated Since Last Review: again here, this field allows you to see if the card in question has been updated since you last reviewed that card.
- Answer: this field pairs with the ‘Question’ field, in that it can display the primary field with any clozes displayed (not hidden). This is useful if you want to separate the primary Text field via ‘question’ and ‘answer.’
- Card: This will display information about the card itself, is it the ‘front’ card, or ‘back’ card, if it is a cloze-deletion note with multiple clozes this field will also contain information abouot which cloze it is (cloze 1, cloze 2, etc.).
- Card Modified: this will tell you when the card was last modified, given as a date.
- Created: this will tell you when the card was created, also given as a date.
- Deck: this will tell you in which deck the card, or cards, are located.
- Difficulty: this is, perhaps obviously, a measure of the ‘difficulty’ of a card. Cards that you have gotten wrong more often will have higher difficulty, and cards that you have gotten correct more often will have lower difficulty. Of importance here is that FSRS uses ‘difficulty’, while the older algorithm, SM-2, relied on ‘ease’.
- Due: this will tell you when the card is next due, given as a date.
- Ease: this is, as per the above discussion of ‘difficulty’, a measurement of, well, the ease of the card. Ease is a calculation used by the older Anki algorithm, SM-2, whereas ‘difficulty’ is used by the newer algorithm, FSRS. The more often you get a card correct, the greater its ease. The less often you get a card correct, the less its ease.
- Interval: this is the current interval of the card. If you last hit, say, the ‘Good’ button and the time interval on that button said 2 months then the current interval is 2 months.
- Lapses: this is the number of times you’ve gotten a card wrong, i.e. hit ‘Again’.
- Note: this will give you information as to the note type used for this particular note, or card.
- Note Modified: like ‘card modified’ this will give you information as to when the note in question was last modified.
- Original deck: this field will give you information as to the original deck to which this particular card belonged.
- Position: this field will tell you the relative position of the given card. Some decks may have cards ordered in various ways, and so the relative position of a card can dictate if you see that card first, or last, depending on its position as well as your deck settings.
- Question: like the ‘answer’ field above, this can separate the question, and answer, portions of the main Text field with any clozes hidden which can help to view the card in question without giving away the content and/or answers.
- Retrievability: famously a difficult one, and worth a little explanation. Retention is the likelihood of your ability to recall a given card when that card is due, and this is how FSRS calculates when to show you the card next. Conversely, Retrievability is the likelihood of your ability to recall a given card right now, regardless of whether or not it is due. There is more than can be said on this, but FSRS only allows you to target retention, and not retrievability, so for 99% of users retrievability is maybe an interesting data point though not a functional target.
- Reviews: this field will give you a numerical value that represents the number of times you have reviewed this card.
- Sort Field: this can be used to sort cards by a particular field, if you would like to organize them by a particular field present in the card.
- Stability: this measures the stability of the card, which is a measurement of how consistent the difficulty of that card is. If, for example, you always rate the card as hard, or always rate the card as good, then your ratings are very consistent and the stability will be high. If, conversely, your ratings tend to be all over the map then the stability of the card will be lower as the perceived difficulty of that card is constantly changing. Cards with higher stability tend to have intervals that change less rapidly, and cards with lower stability tend to have intervals that change more rapidly.
- Tags: this field will list any tags, if present, on the card.
- Target R(retention): this field will list the target retention you have set for the particular deck, or subdeck, to which the card belongs.
