Alert2 - a new alerting component

Hello over here, @redstone99 !

I thought I’d post here on my general list of use cases and desires for future directions, rather than flood a whole bunch of feature request issues into the GitHub, and to let everyone comment.

Right now, I’ve just moved over to Alert2 from HA’s built in Alert, given that the latter has been frozen and may be deprecated (per here). And, let me say up front, I’m already pleased with the extra capabilities I’m getting from it, but it does mean that I’ve got a few feature requests based on making sure I can replicate some of the behaviors of Alert that we’ve got accustomed to here:

  • Alerts that don’t notify immediately (i.e., like the old skip_first option); this is, for example, like door and window open alerts where I don’t want an announcement every time someone goes in and out, but (in cases where the door is deliberately left open) I would like to be able to ack the alert immediately, meaning it should fire straight away. (This is the one I have a GitHub issue for.)

  • I’d like to have the option to hear the stop notification for acked condition alerts.

(To turn this into a use case, if I leave the door open deliberately, I ack the alert so I won’t be reminded. But if someone else closes the door, I’d like to know when that happens. Likewise, if I ack an overheating alert, I’d like to know if the situation resolves itself so I can stop trying to resolve it manually. That sort of case.)

This may actually be a request to have alerts unack when they go on->off, rather than off->on, although that would only apply to condition alerts and not event alerts. I recognize that that would be a possibly breaking change, so maybe as an option?

  • I have a couple of UI requests too. The first one is to make it easier to differentiate active and inactive (condition) alerts. I think one good step for that would be to apply an active color to active alert icons, similar to the state color in entity cards, and/or gray them out. Another one would be to sort “off” condition alerts into a separate section, as is currently done for acked, snoozed, and disabled alerts, and sort them to the very bottom.

I’m not sure how to best handle event alerts in this respect, though? (Unless the alert2.manual_turn_off action suggested here is implemented, of course.)

  • The other is that alongside the current custom card, which works well I find as a sort of “Master Alarm” panel, it would be good to have a custom alert2-row that works like multiple-entity-row; basically, providing the special functionality of the alert row displayed in the custom card in a package that could be dropped into any entities card, or auto-entities card.

This would make it a lot easier to set up, say, room-specific alert cards that provide all the alert functionality. I’ve got a couple of dozen pages in my Home Assistant UI, so it’d be handy to not need to flip back and forth to manage alerts.

So, y’know. Just a few small things. :grin:

Thanks for the great integration!