Everyone on here realizes that the way the scene editor works is it captures the current state of selected devices right? It’s not like the script editor, you aren’t configuring a sequence of actions.
When you make a scene you select devices. Then you “edit” the scene by changing the state of those devices in the real world. When you save the scene it captures the state of those devices as the scene and running the scene returns all your devices to the state they were in.
So when you edit a scene the first thing it has to do is run the scene. This recreates the state you saved. Then you change those devices in the real world and save to update the scene.
Honestly this is pretty normal. Look into some other home automation platforms and I think you’ll find scening features are often offered in the same way. I wouldn’t say no to a warning though, I do forget sometimes.
But it seems like what you all want is a script. A script can do everything a scene can do and more after all. The big difference is that you don’t capture the current state of devices, instead you define what you want to happen step by step. And then there’s no reason to execute a script to edit it, the current state of stuff doesn’t matter.
Some may know how it works, some not. It’s not the point. I know a few Smart Home Automation systems and none of them implements scenes the way HA does it. And there’s surely a reason for this.
The way it works is irrelevant for the end users. What matters is that it’s doing things none wants it to do. It’s not a bug, it’s the way they implemented it. And it’s wrong. It makes people mad, so basically it isn’t helpful. People are hesitant to use it because the way it works. This means it should be changed. It’s a perfect candidate for this year’s streamlining experience Initiative in HA.
There’s 15 participants in this thread. The first issue you linked at the top of this thread has 5 replies and 3 participants besides the developer telling people its working as intended. The second has no replies other then a developer closing it as working as intended.
There are currently 150k deployments of Home Assistant according to analytics (which means there’s a lot more then that since plenty of people don’t turn on analytics). If you’re going to say “no one wants this” you’re going to need to present more evidence then a very small sample size of unhappy users.
EDIT: I see the feature request, sorry was in the middle. 164 is a good amount, fair enough. I’m not 100% disagreeing but I do feel like if you take away the “capture current device state” part of scenes then scenes are frankly kind of pointless. They’re just bad scripts basically. Anyway the FR makes the point more regardless.
EDIT 2: LOL I see I replied to the FR a year ago. At the time it appears I was supremely frustrated by this as well but since then have kind of come around a bit. Or at least am able to acknowledge that I get more about why this change was made. Funny how things change.
You probably didn’t pay attention and did not notice that both were closed within 2 days. Not because of inactivity - because the devs said it’s not a bug. A closed issue cannot be commented anymore. That explains how little community feedback is captured in github.
But as you see - the discussion in the Feature Request section of this community forum is quite extensive. 164 voters are already a lot if you compare it to other features voted in the forum. Some have 300-400 votes, but 164 is also quite a number.
Noone wants to get rid of it. It makes scene creation very easy. That’s the whole point of scenes in other systems. Scenes need GUI support by definition. This support here is only good when you create a scene, but not when you want to tweak it. That’s all.
I find this feature very annoying. I don’t want to activate a Scene when I click on it. I just want to EDIT it. At least offer a way to edit without running it.
This is strange. I have worked with many of these systems and this is the first time I encountered this.
I automate a garage door, and I don’t want all the devices my scenes are connected to, to start jumping around. For whatever reason, automations don’t do this when I am selecting devices. Why make this one way, and the other not? (Please don’t…)
I agree it is annoying and there should be an option at the very least.
For now, I am just only going to use automations using an input boolean for a virtual switch trigger. Kinda sucks and makes the scenes pointless.
How can this still be an issue after 4 years of people complaining?
I encountered this strange behaviour when creating a scene for closing all my blinds. When I went back to just change the area for this scene all my blinds went down without me activating the scene anywhere. Can be annoying but can be also dangerous, depending on what you’re doing and what the outcome would be when a scene gets activated. Imagine you’re remote editing a scene and don’t realize that you’re thereby activating it.
This seriously needs to get fixed! Went to make some thermostat adjustments while at work for a few scenes and got a call from my wife wondering if our house was possessed! Completely forgot about this crazy counterintuitive behavior. Not only does editing a scene cause it to trigger when I don’t want, doing more than one edit in quick succession can create errors (states don’t change fast enough for some devices and can be unknowingly saved in the “wrong” state in a different scene. The default should allowing editing without triggering (like automations) and a manual “real time” option to adjust and save.
