Consistent use of dashboards

Feature Requests
1

Recently, the energy monitoring feature of HA became configurable as a dashboard. Excellent choice.
A dashboard can be considered as a canvas specific or multiple items. If I look at this, HA would be much more consistent and flexible if we apply some basisc rules to what a dashboard would be and what it can do:

  1. Dashboards have a title and an Icon that appeas in the left menu. This defines consistenly what the left menu items are (dashboards)
  • Make ALL left menu items a dashboard, including Map, history, logbook, media
  • Make dashboards editable (at least the title and icon) in the dashboards list
  • Make it possible to order the dashboards in the dashboards list; the left menu will be ordered accordingly
  1. Dashboards can have tabs, just like the overview dashboard
  • Users can change the name and icon of a tab
  • Users can change the order of the tab
  • Users can add a tab (just like the overview dashboard) to any dashboard.

This enables users to group functionality to a dashboard. For example an energy dashboard dedicated to energy, where one tab would show the standard energy dashboard as we currently know, with a tab to individual energy meters as in the general view.

  1. Dashboards can be hidden
  • Per user. Just like you can define a tab in the overview dashboard to be visible for particular users or not.
  • Hidden dashboards do not show in the left menu. All dashboards will be shown in the dashboard list at all times.
  • System settings (could also be a dashboard, including the list of dashboards) can not be hidden for admins

This enables us to manage what is default shown through the left menu, indepenent to how the app will be configured.

2

Home Assistant recently hired a frontend designer. This is the sort of feedback they have requested. You should also post this here:

3

Thank you for this post.

The front-end needs some serious clarity and it starts with dashboards.

I very much like your suggestion that everything shown on the left actually is a dashboard. Consequently, everything shown on a dashboard should be a card.

The new energy dashboard really confuses me. It is a massive step backwards. There is next to nothing that can be configured as the content is pretty much hardwired. It lives in a parallel world to the beautiful energy cards that the community produces. From my perspective, it would have been much more simple, elegant and helpful if the content of that dashboard had been cards.

But then it’s the year of streamlining. Maybe this could be part of it. And yes, the same is true for map, history, logbook and especially media, that also feels disconnected from the rest of Lovelace and my media controls.