Card IDs & history
Your cards live in notes you keep editing. A card you reword in week nine is still the same card, and it should keep the months of scheduling it has earned.
DecksMD manages that with a small marker written into the note next to each card:
## What does FSRS stand for?
Free Spaced Repetition Scheduler.%%dk:h:x7f2%%That %%dk:h:x7f2%% is an ordinary Obsidian comment. It is the card’s identity — not a
copy of its content, just a name that stays put while the content changes around it.
What it protects
Section titled “What it protects”With the marker in place, all of these keep the card’s full history:
- Rewording the question or the answer, however heavily.
- Moving the card to a different position in the note.
- Reordering the file, or cutting and pasting the card elsewhere — the marker travels with the text you moved.
- Fixing a typo in the front, which without a marker would look like a different card.
Without it, a card is recognised by its front text alone. That works — an unchanged front still finds its history — but it means any edit to the front looks like a new card.
Where the marker goes
Section titled “Where the marker goes”It is placed wherever it can sit without disturbing what you wrote:
- Header + paragraph — on its own line after the answer.
- Tables — inside the row’s first cell.
- Cloze — at the end of the line.
Seeing it, or not
Section titled “Seeing it, or not”The marker is an Obsidian comment, so reading view has never shown it. Live Preview did, which meant a note full of cards was also a note full of markers.
Settings → UI → Hide card ID markers (on by default) hides them while you edit in Live Preview. The line your cursor is on reveals its own marker, so it stays editable when you need it. Nothing is removed from the file — turn the setting off, or switch to source mode, and every marker is there.
When progress resets
Section titled “When progress resets”Deleting a card’s content and writing something substantively different starts that card fresh. This is deliberate rather than a limitation.
FSRS state is a model of how well you remember particular content. The stability and difficulty it learned for one question do not predict how well you will recall a different one. Carrying the old schedule onto genuinely new material would tell you a card is well-known when you have never actually studied it.
So the rule is straightforward: reword freely and keep your history; replace a card and start over. Which of the two happened is decided by whether the marker survived your edit.
Treat the marker as part of the card
Section titled “Treat the marker as part of the card”Two things worth avoiding:
- Don’t copy a marker onto a second card. Two cards claiming one identity is the single case this design cannot resolve.
- Don’t delete markers in bulk to tidy a note. They are how your review history stays attached; removing them all resets every card whose front you have since edited.
If you do lose one, nothing is destroyed — the card is simply identified by its front text again, and an untouched front still recovers its history.
Front
Back
Free Spaced Repetition Scheduler.