Known Issues

Hardware acceleration and startup issues on Windows/Linux

Hardware acceleration defaults to off on Windows and Linux. Enabling it in the preferences screen and restarting Anki may make Anki’s interface more responsive, but some users may experience missing menubars, blank windows or crashes when it is enabled.

On Windows if you’re unable to get to Anki’s preferences screen and restarting Anki a few times does not help, you may need to manually adjust the graphics driver. You can do this by starting cmd.exe and typing the following:

echo auto > %APPDATA%\Anki2\gldriver

There are three settings you can try: 'auto', 'angle', and 'software'. If you have problems both when hardware acceleration is turned on and turned off in the preferences, it’s worth giving 'angle' a go.

On Linux, you can write either 'auto' or 'software' into ~/.local/share/Anki2/gldriver to adjust the driver. Please note that if you’re using nouveau, it is known to be buggy and it only supports software mode.

Interface speed

Even if you enable hardware acceleration as mentioned above, you may find Anki takes longer to start and show new windows - especially if your computer is not the fastest. This is caused by the use of a newer web toolkit, which brings new features and security improvements, but is unfortunately more resource intensive. The web toolkit older Anki versions use has been abandoned at this point, so it is no longer an option for future releases.

Blank screens and eGPUs on Macs

If you experience blank screens when using an external graphics card on a Mac, You can either use the -alternate version from the download site, or ctrl+click on the Anki app, click "Get Info", and enable the "prefer eGPU" option.

When switching between monitors of different resolutions, you may also run into problems that can be worked around.

Shortcuts

The undo shortcut is different in the alternate version due to an issue with the toolkit. You can discover the alternate shortcut by looking at the Edit menu of the main screen.

On macOS, the alternate build does not support some shortcuts like cmd+left/right when editing cards. Fn+left/right does work instead. You can also use a third party tool like BetterTouchTool or Karabiner to intercept the cmd+left/right keystroke when you type it into Anki, and have it automatically be rewritten to use the function key instead.

Copy & paste problems on Windows

If you are experiencing problems with copying and pasting on Windows, please check if you are running other programs on your computer that monitor the clipboard, such as dictionary programs, clipboard managers or clipping tools. The toolkit Anki uses can have trouble when such programs are running.

Fcitx on Linux

The standard Anki build includes fcitx support, but it may not work on all distributions. If you are unable to use fcitx, you may want to run Anki from source, or switch to a different input method.

Text size

If you find the text is the wrong size, there are two environmental variables you can try:

  • ANKI_NOHIGHDPI=1 will turn off some of Qt’s high dpi support

  • ANKI_WEBSCALE=1 will alter the scale of Anki’s web views (like the deck list, study screen, etc), while leaving interface elements like the menu bar alone. Replace 1 with the desired scale, such as 1.5 or 0.75.

On Windows you can add these to a batch file to make it easier to start Anki. For example, create a file called startanki.bat on your desktop with the following text:

set ANKI_WEBSCALE=0.75
start "Anki" "C:\Program Files\Anki\anki"

After saving, you can double click on the file to start Anki with that setting.

SSL errors

The following applies to Anki versions before 2.1.28. Newer versions use the system keychain, and no longer need the workaround below.

Some work and school networks intercept your internet traffic, and this can cause errors when syncing and downloading add-ons. You can prevent the errors from occurring by setting the environmental variable "ANKI_NOVERIFYSSL" to "1".

When you enable this option, you are telling Anki not to verify that it is actually talking with AnkiWeb. This means that not only your work or school, but also a bad actor on the local network may be able to intercept your syncing traffic.

On Windows, you can create a .bat file as described in the Text size section above.

On Mac, you can open Terminal.app, then start Anki with the following command:

ANKI_NOVERIFYSSL=1 open /Applications/Anki.app

On Linux, use the following in a terminal:

ANKI_NOVERIFYSSL=1 anki

Once you’ve started Anki with SSL disabled, you can download the following add-on to make the change permanent:

https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/878367706