Adaptive Speed Focus (aSFM)

The answer shows up right when you'd have got there, and you still do the grading.

aSFM is an auto-reveal timer for Anki. Every card gets its own wait, based on how much there is to read and how hard the card is for you. When the wait runs out, the answer appears. It never grades the card for you. You still press Again, Hard, Good or Easy yourself.

It keeps a review session moving without rushing you. You stop sitting on cards you already know, and the cards you're stuck on don't hold you up.

Why it's different

• A different wait for every card. A two-word card and a five-line clinical vignette shouldn't get the same timer. aSFM counts the words you can actually see, adds time for long answers, and adjusts the wait using the card's FSRS difficulty (or its ease and lapses on the classic scheduler).
• It learns your speed, if you let it. Opt-in and local only: nothing is recorded until you tick "Learn my pace". Auto-tune slowly adjusts the timer to how fast you really answer, with a separate pace for review, learning, new, picture and one-by-one cards. One-click calibration sets your timings from Anki's own review history, so it works on day one, then from your own reveals once aSFM has seen enough. You see the numbers before anything changes.
• Easy to hold. Click More time, or press P, to stop the countdown on the card you're on. Do it again and it carries on from where it stopped. The pause sticks across cards, and every card says so while it's on.
• It never grades. That's the main change from Glutanimate's original Speed Focus Mode: aSFM only shows the answer, and you still decide how well you knew it.

How it looks

• A slim countdown bar along the bottom of the card, in Anki's own accent colour. It turns red when the answer is about to show, and an optional warning chime plays at the same point.
• A faint More time button with its shortcut shown as a keycap. It comes up to full strength when you hover over it.
• A clear amber paused badge, so a stopped timer never looks like a bug.
• Works in light and dark mode, and turns its animations off if your system asks for reduced motion.

Built for real decks

• AnKing-friendly. Hidden fields, tag lists and hint buttons don't count towards the word count.
• Picture cards (anatomy, histology, image occlusion) can get a set time instead of a word count, since there's little text to read. Common picture note types are picked for you the first time.
• One-by-one cloze cards run a short timer for each cloze, spotted automatically from the "One by one" field.
• Skip lists for any note types or decks you'd rather review untimed.
• New cards are left alone by default, because they need time to read, not just to recall. You can switch them on.

New in 1.4.0

• Learn my pace is now opt-in. Nothing about your reviews is recorded until you tick it on the welcome screen or in Settings, and it all stays on your computer. If you used auto-tune before, tick "Learn my pace" (Settings ▸ Your pace) to keep it.
• A pace for each kind of card. Review, learning, new, picture and one-by-one cards each learn their own speed, so reading a new card doesn't skew your review timing. A kind with no data yet follows your review pace.
• One-by-one cards are tracked per cloze. Each cloze you uncover counts on its own, so one-by-one cards now teach the timer properly.
• Calibrate from your review history, from day one. Calibrate reads a sample of Anki's own review log (nothing is stored), takes off the time you spend on the answer side, and suggests your base and per-word timing plus the difficulty weight, learning and new multipliers and picture-card time. Once Learn my pace has enough of your reveals, you can calibrate from those instead, and it measures your own answer-side time too.
• Calibrate does more. Alongside your base timing, tick any of the other settings (difficulty weight, learning and new cards, picture-card time, one-by-one timing) for it to fit.
• Picture note types picked for you, with a "Tick picture types" button to change the list.
• Simpler Settings. Three tabs (Timing, On screen, Your pace). The note-type lists and the detailed per-kind numbers live in pop-ups, and the preview shows your most common card lengths with a "You" column for your learned timing.
• A fresh look on the card. A glowing countdown bar, and a redesigned frosted More time / paused pill that shows the pause key as a keycap.
• Works better with Progressive Word Reveal. The answer waits for the question to finish fading in, the two can share the P key (the first press finishes the fade, the next one pauses the timer), and clicking More time no longer skips the fade or cuts the card's audio.
• Fixed: word counting dropping words like "stage" or "vintage", and pressing Esc in the pause-key box setting Esc as the key.

Existing setups are untouched. An update only fills in settings you don't have yet, so nothing you've tuned is changed.

Getting started

1. Install, restart Anki and start reviewing.
2. A welcome window explains the basics and offers to calibrate the timer to your speed. Reopen it any time from Tools ▸ Adaptive Speed Focus ▸ Welcome & calibration….
3. Fine-tune everything under Tools ▸ Adaptive Speed Focus ▸ Settings…. The preview table shows the exact wait the timer will use.

Before you start: if you run Glutanimate's Speed Focus Mode, disable it so the two timers don't double up. If you run the full AnkiBlitz add-on, this feature is already in it, so don't install both.

The AnkiBlitz suite

aSFM is the flagship of a small family of focus add-ons:

• Progressive Word Reveal: fades the question in word by word at your reading pace. Pairs naturally with aSFM.
• AnkiBlitz Core: timed Blitz sessions, Pomodoro, Focus Lock, profiles and music.
• AnkiBlitz: all of the above in one add-on.

Core + aSFM + Progressive Word Reveal together equal the full AnkiBlitz. Don't run AnkiBlitz alongside any of the other three, because it already contains them.

Notes

• Reworks the auto-reveal concept from Glutanimate's Speed Focus Mode (Copyright © 2017-2021 Aristotelis P., glutanimate.com). The "More time" button is his idea too. Licensed under the GNU AGPLv3 with Glutanimate's Section 7 additional terms: preserve attribution, don't misrepresent origin, and no use of the Glutanimate name for endorsement. Full terms are in LICENSE.
• To change the warning sound, drop your own alert.flac, .ogg, .opus or .wav into the add-on's user_files/ folder. An alert.mp3 works too, but only where Anki's external media player is running, because the reviewer can't play MP3 by itself.
• Tested on Anki 2.1.50+ (Qt6). Found a problem? Report it on GitHub.