Browser

A browser is a window with a subset of elements belonging to the currently opened collection. Browsers for various element subsets are primarily available from the View menu (only at Middle or higher levels). There are also multiple other ways of opening browsers in various contexts with various element subsets. For example, if you are in the Contents window, right click, choose View and then a sub-option such as Branch or Descendants (Ctrl+Space) to open a contents branch or the descendants of the selected elements.

An example browser window looks like this:

SuperMemo: Browser with elements on History of War

With the green-yellow alignment button on the browser toolbar, you can align the browser to the left along with the element window to the right. This way you can preview individual elements as the selection in the browser changes (only if the Synchronization button is down as in the picture). A right-click over the browser area opens the browser menu with advanced operations on the browser.

Browser window components

A browser window is made of the following components:

• Caption - name of the browser and the number of elements displayed in the browser (in the above example, 4247 elements from a collection History of War are displayed)
• Toolbar - buttons providing access to the most often used browser operations (the first button also opens the browser menu)
• Element list - list of elements included in the browser with the following columns (you can change the size and the order of the columns by dragging their gray headers):
  • Sel - click on this field to select the current entry (e.g. to include it in a newly generated element subset). The selected entry is marked with a checkmark in the Sel column. You can toggle the selection with Space. You can also toggle and move to the next row with Ins. You can select consecutive browser elements by clicking the first element, pressing and holding down Shift, and then clicking the last element from the range you want to select. To select nonconsecutive elements, press and hold down Ctrl, and then click each browser element you want to select. Selections are useful in processing element subsets
  • No - position of the element in the browser (i.e. number of the row)
  • Title - title of the element. If the title is cut off, you can reveal it by changing the width of the column by dragging the boundary on the right side of the column heading until the column is wide enough to accommodate it. Alternatively, if Hints are on (e.g. by double-clicking on the hint area in the status bar), you can see the entire title of a given element in a tooltip by hovering the mouse over its cut off title.
  • Prior - priority of the element in percent (0% stands for highest priority)
  • Intrv - current interval of the element. This is the difference between LastRep and NextRep in days
  • LastRep - date of the last repetition of the element
  • NextRep - date of the next repetition of the element
  • Reps - number of times the displayed element has been repeated in learning (since the last time it was forgotten or since the time it was first learned)
  • Laps - number of times the element was forgotten
  • Type - type of a given element: topic, item, concept or task (see also: Topics vs items). See: knowledge tree to understand icons and colors
  • FirstRep - date of the first repetition of the element
  • Dif - difficulty of the element in percent (the darker the field, the more difficult the element)
  • FI - requested forgetting index of the element
  • AF - A-Factor associated with the element (see: SuperMemo Algorithm)
  • Post - the number of times the element has been delayed with Postpone
  • Ord - ordinal number of the displayed element (e.g. used in sorting the pending queue)
  • UF - U-Factor associated with the element (see: SuperMemo Algorithm)
  • ElNo - physical number of the element in the collection. This number may be greater than the total number of elements listed in Statistics, esp. if you have deleted many elements. Those numbers never change, therefore, once you delete a group of elements, it will take some time before the freed element numbers are reused

Some of the browser fields listed above allow of sorting the browser. Click on the field's caption to sort the browser. For example, to sort the browser by the last repetition date, click LastRep. To change the ascending order to the descending order, click again. The elements in the picture are sorted for the Prior field

Visual Browser

In newer Windows, you can browse your elements visually:

Figure: Element browser in the thumbs mode

Visual browser is useful when searching for elements that include pictures. In the picture: Search : Find elements (Ctrl+F) is used to find all elements that contain the word Alzheimer but which may also feature (but do not have to) one of the following texts: ApoE, PS1, Presenilin (the search definition is saved as Alzheimer's Disease):

SuperMemo: You can use AND, OR and NOT search to locate elements in your collection (in the picture: Search : Find elements (Ctrl+F) is used to find all elements that contain the word Alzheimer but which may also feature (but do not have to) one of the following texts: ApoE, PS1, Presenilin)

Further reading

• Using subsets
• Subset operations
• Browser menu
• Browser toolbar
• Incremental learning