Postpone card's review

Rationale

Some people find Anki frustrating because it does not forgive you if you skip a day or a week. When you come back, Anki tells you to review many days of cards immediately. That's overwhelming, and sometimes, it makes people quit Anki.

While Anki is right in a theoretical sense, it is wrong in a practical sense. It may be better for the memory to see everything as soon as possible. But in practice, it's better to be late than to quit Anki entirely.

This add-on is thus made for those people, who know they are humans and not perfect machines. Who know that it's better to cheat with Anki a little bit than to quit it. This add-on changes the due date of every card already learned once, and add to it as many days as you want.

If you want to go one week on holiday, just add 7 days to every card, and you'll see the same number of cards as usual when you come back. (Note however that you may find that you have forgotten more cards than usual).

Second constraint

This add-on should also satisfy a second constraint: you don't need it to review cards.

You'll use this add-on to change the due date of cards. But once it's done and you have synchronized your deck, you can see the cards on any computer, phone, or using Ankiweb.

Usage

You can either add delays to every card, to a deck (and it's subdecks) or to cards selected in the browser.

Step 1: choose the cards to be postponed

• All cards: In the main window, open Tools>Postpone cards.

• By deck: On the Decks page, click on the gear icon of the deck you want to postpone. Then click Postpone cards. (This will include subdecks.)

• Select cards: In the browser, select every card you want to move. Click Edit>Postpone cards in the toolbar. The delay will only be added to cards which you have selected and which are due.

Step 2: input the number of days to postpone

A window will ask you how many days of delay you want to add. Enter the number, and press ok.

The number can be either negative or positive. A negative number removes days, which is useful if you added too many days.

The interval of each card is also changed, to reflect the change in due date. See the configuration section below.

Configuration

The documentation for the configuration file can be found in config.md.

Internal

This add-on does not change any methods. Of course, it adds actions in menus.

TODO

Adding smaller intervals to cards due later

Let us assume you had spent a week without using Anki. You use this add-on and tell Anki so that you don't have to immediately see 7 cards.

But, imagine: maybe even if you don't want to see a full week of cards in a single day, you'd accept to see 2 days of cards. It will take twice as much time, but in a week, you won't be late anymore.

If you set this option to 2, you'll see two days of card every day during a week.

In practice, it means that instead of adding 7 days to every single card, it will add 7 days to the cards due 7 days ago. It will add 6 days to the card due 6 and 5 days ago. It will add 4 days to the cards due 4 and 3 days ago, and so on.

Reorder in function of priority

This add-on does not take into account which cards are urgent and which ones can wait. Maybe you took a week of holiday. During those holidays, you were supposed to see cards which you last saw the week before the holiday, and some other cards you last saw 6 months ago. Clearly, the first one is more urgent than the second one.

Using this option, you'll still have the same number of cards to see today, but you'll see the more urgent one first.

Not that the more urgent one may potentially be the hardest one. If you use this option, you may have a lot of «see again» in the first days, instead of having a few of them during the whole week.

Links, license and credits