I have a bunch of scenes I use just for turning things off. Like I have several scenes that turn off everything in a multi-room part of my house and one that turns off everything in the entire house. There’s really no subtlety to these scenes, I don’t need to actually put my lights/devices into the off state to know what I want these scenes to do. I just want to pick which devices to turn off, I don’t need to sit in the dark to know that they are working correctly.
The scene editor in the UI is mostly fine for scenes which turn things on. I’m probably the class of user who would prefer to just type in YAML then move switches around but I can see why the state capture style editor is useful for getting tougher lighting decisions correct. But it would be great if scenes just listed the things to turn off without actually requiring you literally turn them off to edit that scene.
Or at the very least can you at least add a message to the top of the list of scenes that warns users clicking edit will activate the scene? I rarely use the scene editing UI right now because everytime I do I accidentally turn off the lights on my family and get yelled at. And then I tell myself just do it in YAML until I inevitably forget why I shouldn’t use the UI sometime later and repeat the cycle.
I third that. Can’t really understand why that’s not a thing. I usually just wait until it’s night to edit my night scene, morning to edit my morning scene, etc. It would be really nice to be able to edit scenes without actually invoking them.
Yea I basically just moved all my scenes to Node-RED. Almost all are just empty placeholders in HA and I listen for the call_service event of type scene.turn_on then send it to the right place based on the name. That way I can edit them freely and include stuff that can’t normally be in scenes, like music.
The one or two that I haven’t bothered to migrate I just edit in YAML.
As a really new HA user I found the scene editor UI utterly confusing. It probably doesn’t help that I am trying to use scenes to control my Meross TRVs and there can be up to a 3 minute delay between setting a property and the actual TRV changing. So for example I can change a property in the UI and then moments later it changes back. I assume this is because the UI editor waits a few seconds for the expects property change and then queries the property and displays the result, which is not yet changed! So I would love the scene editor to allow property setting without controlling the actual device.
BTW, how do I edit the YAML for a scene. I don’t get any option like for other artifacts I can edit. And if you are kindly answering this question, please treat me as complete novice.
In the same folder as your configuration.yaml file there is a scenes.yaml file. Any changes you make to your scenes in the UI go in this file in YAML so to make manual changes to them you can edit this file.
Bear in mind that this file is essentially controlled by the Home Assistant UI so its not entirely a normal YAML file. Any time you make changes to scenes in the UI HA will completely re-write this file. Your changes will still apply but HA will freely reformat the YAML and remove any comments you added. You also shouldn’t !include other files.
If you want to make scenes purely in YAML that you only edit in YAML and never in the UI then you should add a labelled block to your configuration.yaml like so:
# Don't touch this
scene: !include scenes.yaml
# Add this
scene yaml_only: !include scenes_yaml_only.yaml
Then the scene editor in the UI will do its thing in scenes.yaml and you can have your own YAML-only scenes that you maintain in a separate file. This is documented here. Well sort of, its actually talking about how to go from YAML only scenes to editing scenes in the GUI but you can do the same thing in reverse too lol.