Title pretty much sums it up… or am I making things more difficult than they are and missing something?
I’m not quite ready to fully commit to my own custom configuration for the UI, but I would like to have something more visually appealing to my tastes but everything I’ve found for enabling theme support says to change ‘default_config’ to ‘frontend’…
No, you don’t change it.
You just add a frontend: section to your configuration.
Can you tell me where you read that it needs changing please? You’re like the third person I’ve seen that wants to delete it and replace it with something and it’s going to be causing people big problems.
The default_config includes the frontend component
Yes, but if you want to add extra options you have to add your own with your specified things, ie themes as per the OP’s request 
Agree, my comment was more to point the OP in what default config is
Various Tutorials across the `tubes
…aside from that I think there are a few other contributing factors not limited to: The Wiki isn’t in the best of conditions… which is to be expected when… HA has gone through several iterations as a project. From side-loading HA onto a Raspbian install, to Hassbian, to a previous HASS.io, etc, etc…
Before seeing the responses to my question I assumed that adding a ‘frontend:’ declaration would have broken the YAML in much the same way as adding a second ‘sensors’ or a second ‘weather’.
Most importantly… and this is coming as a gripe from someone with a long, long history of similar projects (I used to DEV and maintain a World of Warcraft Private Server… Ranked… while I was Dev’ing we were competing for Top3 every month… point is- I’m not a noob…) where changes get rolled up and made live before the supporting documentation is in place. I mean… just this last update- huge chunk of the config disappeared from the config file…
As an exercise… somewhere in the Wiki is a syntax block for the Nortek\GoControl HUSBZB-1 zwave\zigbee usb stick… take a crack at finding it… it’s not hidden, by any means, just that there are several deadends.
So… I attempted to revisit this but my patience got used up when checking the error log alerted me to another, more serious issue that I had to fix… so… anyone mine throwing together a code snippet to enable themes that are each saved as their own files and stored in the /config/_custom/themes/ directory?
Pretty Please?
# Configure a default setup of Home Assistant (frontend, api, etc)
default_config:
frontend:
!include_dir_merge_list config/_custom/themes/
# Uncomment this if you are using SSL/TLS, running in Docker container, etc.
I’ve not actually tested this iteration… which may or may not be a duplicate of an earlier attempt… figured I’d save myself some frustration and ask first if anyone sees a reason this shouldn’t work…
!include_dir_merge_named _custom/themes/
Can I get the verbose version of that?
I tried-
# Configure a default setup of Home Assistant (frontend, api, etc)
default_config:
frontend:
!include_dir_merge_named _custom/themes/
# Uncomment this if you are using SSL/TLS, running in Docker container, etc.
…which HASS abandoned on the restart and threw a config_error notification and a brief ‘[object, object]’ box showed on screen… something I’ve come to recognize as normal when the config isn’t right)…
so i tried
# Configure a default setup of Home Assistant (frontend, api, etc)
default_config:
!include_dir_merge_named _custom/themes/
# Uncomment this if you are using SSL/TLS, running in Docker container, etc.
# http:
# base_url: example.duckdns.org:8123
# Text to speech
…which… longer ‘[object, object]’ string (wouldn’t surprise me if it was an [object] for every theme in the directory + 2)… but no notification and the restart actually processed, but still no themes available in the drop down.
Forgive the confusion… I’m normally pretty effective at things like this, I just have a tendency to break things in unordinary and unusual ways while getting to a point of seeming proficiency.
default_config:
frontend:
themes: !include_dir_merge_named _custom/themes/
Hey… perfect… look at that. Themes!
I see now that I was forgetting the themes: in front of the !include. Thank you.
Will this entry to the config create the themes folder in hassio or do i have to create a custom/themes folder.
frontend:
themes: !include_dir_merge_named custom/themes
In your config folder (ie with configuration.yaml and other yaml files create a custom folder and then create themes in that folder.
You need to create the folder. (s)
Thanks David
I had created them in the root dir
Once I’ve copied some themes from GitHub into the themes folder will they be selectable from the profile page drop down
Yes they will.