Custom Controls

An Anki add-on for remapping the keys you use while reviewing — built because Anki has no way to answer cards with the arrow keys.

Every reviewer shortcut is remappable from one dialog, the answer buttons show the key you actually bound, and the zoom level finally survives a restart.

Features

Arrow-key answering, out of the box. ← Again, ↓ Hard, ↑ Good, → Easy, with 1–4 still working alongside them. While the question is showing, an answer key reveals the answer instead of doing nothing — so a card is ↑ then ↑, rather than Space then ↑.

Remap all 36 reviewer actions. Answering, undo, edit, flags 1–7, bury/suspend, set due, delete, card info, audio playback/seek/record, auto advance. Click a box and press the key; + gives an action a second key, × removes one, and an empty row unbinds the action entirely — including keys Anki normally provides. Duplicate bindings are refused on save with a list of the clashes.

The answer buttons show your keys. Anki labels its ease buttons 1 2 3 4, which is misleading the moment you remap them. They become ← Again, ↓ Hard, ↑ Good, → Easy, or whatever you bound.

Persistent zoom. Anki's View → Zoom is forgotten on restart. Set the zoom here — slider, percentage box, live preview on the card behind the dialog — and it comes back next launch. Zoom you set from Anki's own menu or with ctrl+scroll is adopted and kept too, rather than overridden.

A cheat sheet. Tools → Review Keys lists everything currently bound.

Import/export. Save a keymap to a JSON file and load it on another machine or share it.

Scrolling that still works. Since ↑/↓ are taken, Ctrl+↑ / Ctrl+↓ scroll long cards (step configurable), and bound keys are stopped from scrolling the card — never inside a type-in-answer field, where typing keeps working normally.

Only the reviewer's keys are touched. Keys elsewhere in Anki, and any reviewer key this add-on doesn't know about — alternate keyboard layouts, other add-ons — are left alone.

Install

From a release: download custom_controls.ankiaddon and open it with Anki (or Tools → Add-ons → Install from file), then restart.

From source:

git clone https://github.com/g00bert/anki-custom-controls.git
cd anki-custom-controls
./install.sh          # symlinks src/custom_controls into your Anki add-ons folder

Close Anki before running install.sh, and restart it afterwards. Your settings live in meta.json inside the add-on folder and are preserved.

Usage

Tools → Customize Controls… (or the Config button in Anki's add-on manager). Two presets are built in: Arrow key and Anki defaults. The Find box filters the action list by name or by key.

Everything is stored in Anki's normal add-on config, so it can also be edited by hand from Tools → Add-ons → Config; see config.md for what each setting does.

Building

./build.sh                    # writes dist/custom_controls.ankiaddon
./build.sh --verify FILE      # check an existing package

The build checks the archive against AnkiWeb's packaging rules and fails rather than producing a package that would be rejected. Listing text and upload notes live in docs/ankiweb-listing.md.

Compatibility

Developed and tested against Anki 26.08.1 (Qt6) on Linux. It uses only public gui_hooks, and any action a given Anki version doesn't provide is skipped rather than erroring, so earlier releases will likely work — but that is unverified. If you hit a problem on another version, please open an issue with your Anki version from Help → About.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.