To help my daughter learning English words, I decided to give Anki a try a couple of years ago. It greatly reduces effort and increases efficiency by tracking when to repeat each individual word in either direction: English to/from Ukrainian. But when a younger daughter started studying English, I realized that it’d be best to just copy cards from the first deck to be able to track the review history separately. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a ready solution for what seemed to be a very straight forward task: create a new card, copy over individual field values and toss it to the other deck. So I created a new addon to automate those manual actions.

First of all, to overcome Anki recognizing the same words even from different decks as duplicates, it’s necessary to introduce a new card type. The card types may contain exactly the same fields and note types, but should be named distinctly.

Anki and its addons are developed in Python. So it’s worth preparing development environment:

virtualenv /tmp/venv
source /tmp/venv/bin/activate
pip install 'python-language-server[all]'
pip install mypy aqt

Addons are loaded by Anki from ~/.local/share/Anki2/addons21. In my case I just created copy_solia/__init__.py with the following content:

NOTE: Created a GitHub repository for the code: sakhnik/anki-addons

"""."""

import aqt
from aqt import mw
from aqt.utils import tooltip, shortcut
from aqt.qt import QAction


def copy_note(nid):
    """."""
    note = mw.col.getNote(nid)
    model = note.model()
    if model['name'] != "English Yaryna":
        word = note["Front"]
        tooltip(f"Not Yaryna's card: {word}", period=2000)
        return
    if 'solia' in note.tags:
        word = note["Front"]
        tooltip(f"Already copied: {word}", period=2000)
        return

    # Assign model to deck
    solia_deck = mw.col.decks.byName("English:Solia")
    solia_type = mw.col.models.byName("English Solia")
    mw.col.decks.select(solia_deck['id'])
    solia_deck['mid'] = solia_type['id']
    mw.col.decks.save(solia_deck)
    # Assign deck to model
    mw.col.models.setCurrent(solia_type)
    mw.col.models.current()['did'] = solia_deck['id']
    mw.col.models.save(solia_type)

    new_note = mw.col.newNote()
    new_note.fields = note.fields
    new_note.tags = note.tags
    print(new_note)
    mw.col.add_note(new_note, solia_deck['id'])

    note.tags.append('solia')
    note.flush()


def copy_for_solia(browser):
    """."""
    nids = browser.selectedNotes()
    if not nids:
        tooltip("No notes selected.", period=2000)
        return

    # Set checkpoint
    mw.progress.start()
    mw.checkpoint("Copy Notes for Solia")
    browser.model.beginReset()

    for nid in nids:
        copy_note(nid)

    # Reset collection and main window
    browser.model.endReset()
    mw.progress.finish()
    mw.col.reset()
    mw.reset()
    browser.col.save()


def setup_actions(browser):
    """."""
    action = QAction("Copy for Solia", browser)
    action.setShortcut(shortcut("Alt+D"))
    action.triggered.connect(lambda: copy_for_solia(browser))
    browser.form.menu_Cards.addSeparator()
    browser.form.menu_Cards.addAction(action)


aqt.gui_hooks.browser_menus_did_init.append(setup_actions)

And that’s it. Now I can just press on selected cards, and they're automatically duplicated and copied over to the Solia's deck. There are a couple of new requirements:

  • The addon should allow copying into a third deck when the youngest starts studying too
  • There should be a way to synchronize related cards as they evolve. For example, when new tags or examples are added after a card was duplicated.

Anki screenshot with copied cards