The UI editors have come a long way and it would be great to be able to use them but still keep my config in YAML mode. It would be very cool if us lovelace YAML editing folks could use the Lovelace UI card editors to design lovelace cards to create code which we could then copy into our lovelace config.
This would allow for use of the dropdowns and all that lovely stuff and also instant feedback instead of constantly having to reload the lovelace config to see changes while designing a card.
You can. Create another dashboard that uses UI mode, for design purposes. You can then copy the code to your main dashboard yaml file (adjusting the indentation and adding a list delimiter).
Thanks for the suggestion Tom. I did actually try this at one point, indeed it was part of the inspiration for this request.
If your main lovelace config is storage mode, you can add YAML dashboards to it. You cannot add storage based dashboards to a YAML configuration. Of course I could have read the documentation first and saved myself the trouble because this point is specifically mentioned.
I suppose I could make the default lovelace storage mode and have their real dashboard as the YAML one, but I just think it would just be more convenient just to natively have access to the editors. I also haven’t tried yet to see what happens if you have admin required on the main dashboard and a normal user logs in. I wouldn’t want users to have access to the “dummy” UI.
As it stands now if I really want a Lovelace UI editor for some reason I spin up a venv instance of HA in vscode. Also a bit kludgy but it works.