A language learners’ forum

I have finally decided to give Anki a go, and I'm loving that the desktop app, at least, is open source so that I can tweak it to my heart's content.

This is one of my first add-ons for Anki and Python isn't one of my primary programming languages, so both bug reports and suggestions for improving the code itself are welcome!

Official Anki url: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1384323610

Description
An Anki add-on to slightly modify how the browse window handles tags.

Available Features

• expandTagsByDefault: Displays all your hierarchical tags by default.
  
• collapseSearchesByDefault: Useful if you have your searches "duplicated" as filtered decks too, or if you just want searches to be hidden be default.
  
• refreshTagListAfterDeletingTag After you click the "Remove Tags" button in the browse window, the tag list will refresh itself to show that the tag was successfully removed.

Requirements
To enable or disable features, you must edit the source code. You can find this from the Anki menu Tools > Add-ons > TagTweaks >Edit...

This add-on assumes you also have the Hierarchical Tags add-on installed.

Support
Post a new issue on Github (or make a pull request!). My other Anki add-ons are also on Github.

This addon is licensed under the same license as Anki itself (GNU Affero General Public License 3).

Tried it but it crashed on browse. Posted the issue.

zenmonkey wrote:Tried it but it crashed on browse. Posted the issue.

I've updated the script, so grab the latest version and let me know if that fixes the crash. I asked for some follow-up information on the Github issue.

Now works fine!

I just need to figure out how to use tags properly.

For example I just finally figured out that to use my German tag I actually need to write "tag:german*" because it is a hierarchy....

zenmonkey wrote:Now works fine!

Yay!

zenmonkey wrote:I just need to figure out how to use tags properly.

For example I just finally figured out that to use my German tag I actually need to write "tag:german*" because it is a hierarchy....

I'm also figuring out exactly how using tags will work best for me. Right now I'm obsessively over-tagging, under the theory that "more is better", but I expect to cut back once I've used it for a bit and seen which onces are actually useful in practice.

Cool hack!

As for folks asking about tagging, here's one more data point: Personally, I prefer to organize my decks into languages and media types. I find it very weird to jump from French text to Spanish audio to hieroglyphics; it upsets my rhythm. And I can review text sometimes, but not audio. But beyond that, I try not to add too many tags. There's always a temptation to make the perfectly-organized Anki deck, but I find it's more efficient to make cards quickly and just chug through reviews, deleting anything that annoys me.

I'm planning to have only one deck per language (although if I add sound to any cards, I might take your advice and make it one deck per language–media type pair). As you say, jumping between languages sounds like a great way to befuddle one's brain without any real learning benefit.

My tags are things like "Spanish::grammar::subjunctive" or "source::books::el-marciano". I don't expect to need them often, but I can imagine sometimes wanting to find something specific or maybe do a cram-session around something fine-grained. Since I kinda like organizing things, it's more fun than annoying to tag-and-forget, at least for me.

But you do you! If you don't enjoy tagging and get little/no benefit from having "the perfectly-organized Anki deck," then skip it.

My decks are grouped by language but are definitely not single decks per language. I don't want music decks mixed in with grammar.
What I do mostly is:

german::assimil::l32
hebrew::pod101::earlyvocab
german::music::fanta4::sieistweg

Would you know how to create new groupings like "- German" or "- Hebrew"

I haven't made subdecks myself yet, but according to the manual, you either name them "German::Songs MCDs" or you drag-n-drop.