Title cards, reverse cards & per-card tags
Beyond the four main formats, DecksMD has three smaller features for shaping your cards.
Title format
Section titled “Title format”Set Title as the header level in your profile to use the filename as the front and the entire file as the back. This is handy for one-note-one-concept vaults where each file is a single idea.
It suits zettelkasten-style vaults especially well: if you already name notes as claims — Spaced repetition beats massed practice.md — then the filename is a question and the note is its answer, and you get a deck out of a vault you never wrote for flashcards at all. Because the whole file is the back, it is the one format where card length is entirely up to you.
Reverse cards
Section titled “Reverse cards”Add reverse: true to a file’s frontmatter to auto-generate a reversed copy of every card in that file (back becomes front). Progress is tracked separately per direction, so the two directions schedule independently.
---tags: [decks/spanish]reverse: true---
## Hola
Hello.That one heading becomes two cards, scheduled separately:
Front
Back
Hello.
Front
Back
Hola
Independent scheduling is the important part. Recognising a word and producing it are different skills, and one is usually much further ahead than the other — so the easy direction drifts out to long intervals while the hard one keeps coming back. Merging them into a single card would average away exactly the difference you need to train.
Reverse works with tables too, so a two-column vocabulary table becomes twice as many cards without any extra authoring. It is worth turning on per file rather than globally: reversing a definition (“the process plants use to convert sunlight” → “photosynthesis”) is useful, but reversing an explanatory paragraph rarely is.
Per-card tags
Section titled “Per-card tags”Add #tag directly inside a header to tag an individual card:
## What is photosynthesis? #plants #high-school
The process plants use to convert sunlight into energy.- Tags are stripped from the displayed front and shown as chips during review.
- They’re inherited by table rows and reverse cards.
- Use them to build filter (“custom”) decks that pull every card with a given tag across your whole vault — see Custom decks.
Per-card tags are what make cross-cutting revision possible. A note about one case might be relevant to two modules; a note on one pathway might matter for both physiology and pharmacology. Tagging the individual card rather than the file lets it appear in both filter decks without being duplicated, and the card keeps a single scheduling history no matter how many decks it shows up in.