How to Use

From importing your template to pasting it back into Anki

🖼 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 touched a template before, you can skip this step and just start 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. Click to style

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. {{FieldName}} chips are Anki placeholders and are never altered by editing, so feel free to click them too.

4. Copy the 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. The editor preserves your original template's line breaks and formatting as closely as possible.

Check how it looks in night mode, and fix the colors

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 are locked. Those have no reason to differ between day and night, so turn night mode off to change them and they apply to both.

For the details and guidance on picking colors, see When Your Text Colors Disappear in Night Mode.

Save the template you're working on, so you can pull it back out later

If you work with more than one note type, you'll end up switching between several templates — polishing one for English vocab, then wondering about the one for Japanese example sentences, then coming back. Copying the code out of Anki again every time gets old. 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 — since that replaces whatever you're currently working on, you'll get a confirmation prompt first. Clean up templates you no longer need with [Delete].

The most useful moment to use it is 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 worth flagging — My Templates isn't 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 it's gone too. 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 fields like {{Word}} as gray pills. That's enough to check the structure, but it can't answer a question like "I bumped Word up to 40px — is that too big?" A pill's length has nothing to do with your real content's length.

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 swapping that in for your own card's content makes the preview more accurate. Want to see the pill again on purpose? Just clear the box. 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.

There's a misconception worth clearing up here — some people leave the boxes blank because they worry the sample content will sneak into the template code and follow them into Anki. It won't. 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.