How to Use

How to use ankieditor — bring a template in from Anki and edit it the easy way

🖼 See the detailed walkthrough with screenshots

1. Copy your template from Anki

In Anki, open Tools → Manage Note Types → Cards... to see three editing panes: Front Template, Back Template, and Styling. Select all (Ctrl+A) in each pane and copy its contents. If you've never edited a template before, you can start straight from one of the built-in presets, like Basic or Cloze, in the editor's [Import] dialog.

2. Paste it into the editor

Click [Import] at the bottom of the editor, paste each piece of code into its matching field, and click [Load]. The 📋 button next to each field fills it in automatically from your clipboard.

3. Edit it the easy way

Click whatever you want to change in the card preview on the right to select it, then use the panel on the left to change the font, size, color, alignment, or line spacing. Click an empty area of the card to target the whole card instead.

4. Copy the changed code back into Anki

Click [Copy Code] to open a menu where you can copy the Front Template, Back Template, and Styling separately. Paste each one into the matching pane on Anki's Cards screen and save — that's it.

Set colors that apply only in night mode (dark mode)

If you use Anki in night mode, you need to know whether the colors you picked on a bright screen still read on a dark background. Tick [Night Mode] above the preview and the card switches to the way it looks in Anki's night mode.

Anki's night mode darkens the card background and the default text color, but it leaves any color you set yourself alone. So if you painted your answers blue, they can sink into the dark background. When that happens, keep night mode on, click that part, and pick a color under Text Color or Background Color. The color you pick applies only in night mode, and your everyday color stays as it is. To undo it, press [Clear night colors for this target] below the color pickers.

While night mode is on you can only change colors — font, size, alignment and line height can't be changed. Those have no reason to differ between day and night, so they're locked here to avoid confusion. If you do want to change them, turn night mode off and the change applies to both.

For the details and guidance on picking colors, see How to Set Colors in Anki Night Mode (Dark Mode).

Save the template you're working on, and load it back

More than one note type means more than one template, and that gets unwieldy. Say you're polishing the template for English vocab and then need to fix the one for Japanese example sentences — copying the code out of Anki again every time is a chore. Click [My Templates] at the bottom of the editor to open the library.

Type a name — something like "English vocab" — into the Template name box and click [Save Current Template]. That's it: the Front Template, Back Template, and Styling you're currently editing are saved together, sample values included. Saving under a name you've already used will ask if you want to overwrite it. Click [Load] next to any saved entry to switch to it — but be careful: whatever you're working on now is discarded and the saved template opens in its place. Clean up templates you no longer need with [Delete].

This is most useful right before a big change. Save a checkpoint before you make a large change to colors or layout, and if you don't like the result, you can load it back and return to where you started.

One thing to watch out for — [My Templates] is not saved to an account. It's stored only in the browser you're currently using. Think of it like a drawer in your desk: switch to a different computer or a different browser and that drawer isn't there. Clear your browser data and everything in the drawer is gone. For anything you want to keep long-term, use [Copy Code] to copy it out and save it somewhere else, like a text file.

Fill in field sample values to preview your card for real

Right after you import a template, the preview shows the field names themselves. That's enough to check the structure, but real card content is longer than a field name, so it's hard to judge whether your template actually reads well. Fill in Field sample values with the content you want and you can see it the way a real card looks.

Open Field sample values at the bottom of the left panel and it expands. You get one input box per field the editor detected, and typing something a real card would contain — say "apple" in the Word field, "a round red fruit" in the Meaning field — updates the preview immediately. Any field you haven't set yet comes pre-filled with its own field name, so clearing that out and typing your own card's content gives you a truer preview. Clear every sample box and the field names show through as {{FieldName}} again. For a Cloze template, type {{c1::content}} syntax directly into the Text field's sample, and the preview shows the blank actually hidden, the way it would in a real cloze card.

Sample content never leaks into the template code, so it won't show up in Anki. Sample values are preview-only. They never make it into the code that [Copy Code] copies, so fill them in as freely as you like. Save to My Templates and the sample values are saved right along with everything else, ready the next time you load it.

Get in the habit of filling in samples before you start fine-tuning a template, and you'll dodge the frustrating "looked done, but reads awkwardly on a real card" surprise.