Anki add-on: Pause New

Pause New keeps your new cards from piling up all at once. When you're studying and too many cards stack up in your learning queue (the ones you're still trying to memorize), this add-on quietly stops showing you new cards until you've worked through that backlog. Once you've cleared it, new cards start coming again automatically. The result: you learn new cards in small, manageable batches instead of drowning in a huge pile at once. It only changes how many new cards appear — it never touches your card schedules or review timing, so it's safe to use alongside FSRS. How to use it Just study like normal. By default, once 10 cards are in your learning queue, new cards pause. When you've cleared that queue back down to 0 , new cards resume. There's nothing to click — it happens on its own. You can also pause on demand: press P while reviewing to stop new cards early (handy when you hit a card you want to step away from). Press P again to resume, or just keep going and it resumes by itself once your learning queue is cleared. Settings Open Tools → Add-ons → Pause New → Config to change any of these: learningLimit — How many cards can be in your learning queue before new cards pause. Default: 10 . resumeAt — New cards stay paused until your learning queue shrinks back to this number. 0 means "finish the whole learning queue before new cards come back." Default: 0 . deckNames — Which decks this applies to. .* means every deck. To limit it to one deck, type part of that deck's name, for example Japanese . (This is matched against the deck you press Study on.) showTooltip — Whether to show a little popup when new cards pause or resume. Default: true . hotkey — Key you press while reviewing to pause/resume on demand. Default: P . Set to "" to disable. Examples: P , Ctrl+P , Shift+N . Note Provided as-is, with no promise of ongoing updates. It may stop working on future Anki versions. Changelog 2026-06-14 Added a hotkey (default P ) to pause/resume new cards on demand. Resuming now returns the deck to its normal preset new-card limit, instead of an outdated "today only" value. 2026-06-13 — initial release Auto-pause new cards when the learning queue reaches a set size, and auto-resume once it's cleared.