With the last update, HA seems to have taken it upon itself to tell me I don’t know how to name my own entities.
I’ve spent much time over the years perfecting my naming convention for entities and renaming over a thousand entities to my liking. Now, when looking at Settings > Devices & services > Entities, the Entity column no longer shows the actual name, but some useless shortened version. I have dozens of entities that just show as “Beep” or “Update” or “Enabled” or “Treble” or “Media Player” etc. Useless to me.
How do I get the Entities list to show my Entity names again? Please don’t tell me there is a toggle in the profile. I’m aware of this new feature and have tried it. It made no difference to this issue.
You might notice that the entity ID isn’t shown in the picker anymore!
We think we are at a point where you may solely rely on the UI and the entity ID is not needed anymore. However, if you do prefer to see the entity ID in this drop down, you can enable it in your profile settings.
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To do so, select your profile picture in the bottom left corner of the Home Assistant UI, and under User settings enable the Display entity IDs in picker option.
The toggle in the profile is for the picker dropdown. This is not that. And as I said in my original post, the toggle does not affect this, at least as far as I can tell.
When i made the upgrade to the latest release i have not seen any update of an entity_id.
I might not be understanding your problem.
Sorry to be potentially misleading.
Correct. entity_id is unchanged. With all due respect, please take a good look at my screenshots to see my issue. The problem is not that the heading for the column has been changed from “Name” to “Entity”, but that the entire column is displaying different information. Again, this has nothing to do with entity_id column as it has not changed.
I see what you’re saying. Unfortunately I don’t know how to fix it.
Naming things in HA has always been a moving target. It depends on where you’re looking what the “name” will be.
then the names change on their own depending on the whim of an integration dev. the latest big one with that was when ESPHome decided to change the way the entities got their names. Which required me to go thru all of my ESPHome devices and manually change all of the names of the entities.
I was actually literally just changing more ESPHome entity names that I had missed (30ish of them) from when the change was made.
The entities got the device names added to the entity names so they had names like “South Garage Door Position Sensor South Garage Door Position Sensor
ESPHome Version”.
I think half the maintenance I do is going thru and renaming devices, entities and entity_ids whenever I add anything to HA because it’s not really straightforward which entities will take the device name and which ones won’t.
Usually I try to stay away from any place that has a “name” field except the dev tools states list. That will always show the correct unshortened name. At least it does now. But I haven’t updated to the 2025.5 version yet either.
I noticed the same, it seems that if it recognises the device name in the name it removes it for display purposes (it also does this in the entity pop up as well).
If you move the entity_id column to the right of the device columns at least you can see how it used to be, albeit split up and reversed !
If I define a name the UI should no strip part of it for display. Even if the prefix is the device name.
O.k. Same behavior was there in the device pages before and there i make sense, but in entitiy list, etc. this is such a worse change now, I cannot believe that it really should stay this way.
On the plus side, after over 5 years with HA, I still haven’t fully figured out how all the different names work, how they interact and where/how they are displayed. So a few more changes shouldn’t make it too much worse.
Seriously though, this is a significant weakness. I hope all these changes are part of a movement toward a more logical approach.
I did some research on my test system and to verify/falsify my fíndings may i ask you to go to the developer tools → states page.
Do you see your names in the list of attributes?
You have to toggle the attibutes switch on the states page to see them.
The name should be under the attribute friendly_name.
I’m so happy a few other people are starting to see what I see, recognize what a mistake/problem this is, and are as upset about this as I am.
I have no problem with HA doing whatever they want to have an algorithm to come up with a name to call an entity. BUT, they also give us the ability to give entities our own in the entity card. Worked great through 2025.4. Now, in 2025.5, HA is overriding our preferred entity name. Hopefully this is a mistake that will get rectified.
Yes, friendly_name shows my name on all the entities, in both versions 2025.4 and 2025.5.
With this observation, it would seem a simple solution on HA’s part to simply add another available column in the column picker and call it Name (as it worked up to 2025.4).
