I’ve been waiting a long time for the tools to help better organise all the things in my Home Assistant instance. All those times I voted for folders and tags has finally paid off. Unfortunately, I’m now confused about how best to use all these wonderful new things.
Floors is the easy bit. I’ve creaed a single floor for the one floor of my apartment. Then I placed all the areas relating to real rooms into it. So far so good.
Then I looked at all the areas I created for non-room things - System, Person, Spares, Chores, Transport… . At this point a did something naughty! I created a floor for these ‘notional’ areas and put the remaining areas into it.
The great thing about areas is that you can go to an area and see, at a glance, all the devices, entities, automations, scripts and scenes associated with that area.
If I recreate this with categories then, I need to create the same set of categories for automations, scripts and scenes and then categorise each item. The dupliaction of the categories in 3 places seems wrong somehow. In addition, I lose the ability to see all the things in a category in one place - I have to switch between the lists for automations, scripts and scenes. Furthermore, I cannot categorise devices or entities.
If I recreate my organisational system with labels then, in contrast to categories, I can label devices and entities (in addition to automations, scripts and scenes). I also only need to maintain one set of labels. However, I still can’t see all the devices, entities, automations, scripts and scenes, with a given label, in one place.
Also, for both categories and labels, I’ll need to get used to the idea that, if I want to see things in a given room then I’ll need to group a list by room - leaving a load of non-room items on the end. Then, if I want to see things in my notional areas, I’ll need to group the list by label - leaving a big load of room stuff on the end.
So, here’s my question: for people that have been using areas in a similar way to me, what are you doing?
Please understand that I am not criticizing how the HA devs have chosen to do this. I just want to decide on the best way to move forward so that I stick with the program.
Thanks in advance.