Entity Names now weirdly shortened

[Deach]

Here’s an evil “gotcha” that’s due to this new and unwanted “feature”.

If you are foolish enough to rename a device, the entities are renamed (if you choose to do so).

BUT

The friendly names are NOT changed and, because this new “feature” crops the name, it’s now impossible to get the friendly name back in sync with the entities name.

Example
A new lock is added called “Front Door”
But I want it to be called Front Door Lock because I have a load of things around the front door.
No problem, I rename the device and tell it to go ahead and rename its entities.
The result?
Device name: Front Door Lock

Entity name: Front Door Battery Percentage
Entity ID: sensor.front_door_lock_battery_percentage

Entity name: Front Door Connected
Entity ID: binary_sensor.front_door_lock_connected

Entity name: Front Door Lock
Entity ID: lock.front_door_lock

Ok, so I go in and rename the Entities
What I name it: Front Door Lock Battery Percentage
What it displays: Battery Percentage

And so on for the rest.
There seems to be NO way of ever displaying the name ever again!

So, it’s not only an unwanted feature, it’s also completely inconsistent as to how it behaves. It may display the interpreted full entity name sometimes, but it won’t display it other times.

I fully realize that changing the entity names when changing the device name probably should not change the friendly name.
BUT, if the friendly name is NOT set manually (it knows this because the field is empty and is greyed out) then it should conform the friendly name to the new name!
That’s pretty basic logic.

Of course this doesn’t change the fact that it should NEVER mangle or modify a display name that’s been set anyway.
Doing so not only negates the whole point of having the display name seperate from the database name in the first place, but by doing so it also tightly couples what’s displayed to the backend (which is a fundamental design flaw in home assistant).
Other examples of this huge design flaw can be seen in unit conversions and time display. There is no real distinction between the display front end and the back end data and it seems to be solely at the discretion, mood or preference of whomever is writing the particular bit of code.
It’s puzzling that this fundamental and very basic architecture issue seems to be just ignored, or, at best, enforced inconsistently.
It seems like what’s displayed to us is almost an inconvenience and how we have to go about displaying data to the real end users (friends, family, etc) is an afterthought, or just ignored.
Example: home assistant is not really touch friendly and seems stuck in an era of mouse clicking when most people interact with computers via tablets and phones.

[carealtor]

Very well said. I sure hope those responsible at HA have seen this thread. I’m holding off making any changes to my entity names in the hope that someone fixes this issue soon.

[Mariusthvdb (Marius)]

so sorry I must have missed this in the previous beta cycle, I noticed it today in beta 2025.6 and was asking about the error (I believed it to be) seeing this

or

requiring us to click the entity to get to their names…

imho, this is rather useless listing like that, especially when having actually set manual names like:

I want that to show.

However:

@carealtor

I sure hope those responsible at HA have seen this thread. I’m holding off making any changes to my entity names in the hope that someone fixes this issue soon.

this will, be futile, as no-one reads this and starts fixing anything, unless an issue in the Frontend repo is raised, and dev’s can follow up in that.

[Swil]

I’ve been driven mad by this change the last couple of weeks, I thought it was a bug that might be fixed in 2025.6.0. But no. It sounds like from this thread it’s intended behaviour??

Has anyone filed a bug report for it yet? I don’t think it’s insane to want the name you manually set as the entity name to show up as the entity name.

The whole point of a system like HA is to have it function how you want, not have your decisions overridden automatically because someone else thought it would look better.

[carealtor]

Has anyone filed a bug report for it yet?

I only know that I have not. I don’t know how.

[Mariusthvdb (Marius)]

@Swil

Has anyone filed a bug report for it yet?

no, but you can open it here in the Discussion section (it isnt a bug, and wont be accepted as such, as it is per design and what the dev team has considered to be desirable at some point in time…)

be sure to link to this and thread and post the link here, so we can jump in

btw, Ive just discovered those names are even weirder now, as they are also translated and not perse linked to the entity_id anymore.

this is starting to be like those I-know-what-is-good-for-you automatic controls in my car that randomly ‘recognize’ speed limits and adjust… except in this case it is not life threatening…

[petro]

@Mariusthvdb

btw, Ive just discovered those names are even weirder now, as they are also translated and not perse linked to the entity_id anymore.

It’s been that way for at least a year

[Mariusthvdb (Marius)]

the point here is that it now also propagates that to the Entity name being the subject of this thread.

I didnt see it before, (not to say it wasnt there before…)

so this field now not only does Not show the name the user has set it to in certain circumstances, it now also uses the translation, which in other circumstances can be even worse.
I dont think anyone in NL will say hey what is the SWW temperatuur at the moment… most wont even know what it stands for (yes, it is correct, I am one of those that do understand the abbreviation without checking wikipedia, I am not contesting that)

We are now practically ‘forced’ to set those names in the frontend config options to get what we want.

It’s impressive what the frontend does, cutting off ‘irrelevant’ bits of the names, even in translation, I admit.

the notion of what is ‘irrelevant’ however is disputable, and being forced either way imho is no good strategy going forward.

@petro

It’s been that way for at least a year

never too late to reiterate (edit)

edit

I now realize we can only mitigate the odd naming of the entity by setting the actual name in the entity options. Setting a name in a card works for the card, but Not for the more-info of the entity…

[carealtor]

Okay, I added this to the Github Discussions

User entered Entity names are being overridden by useless shortened names...

Please everyone make your voices heard on this.

[Deach]

Well, Petro, “I’m moving on because this is futile. Y’all can figure this out on your own”

Flouncing out of the discussion because your being proven wrong is ALWAYS helpful, and may I say typical of the arrogant, nanny “we know what you want much better than you do” attitude prevalent in home assistant.
Even the old, tired, excuse “it’s not a bug if we deliberately screwed up a decision” has been used here.

I’m astounded that anyone would deliberately write code that mutilated a user defined field.
I’m even more astounded that instead of providing a reasonable path to correct this obvious mistake, we are handed excuses, the issue is deliberately misinterpreted, and then we are abandoned.

Good coders are leaving this project.

There’s an ever increasing amount of abandoned code outside of the exalted ranks of core and I’m wondering if there’s attitude adjustment required when the gatekeepers and experts start to see their function not as helping toward solutions for users, but as protectors and justifiers of the almighty core coders.

[arganto]

@Mariusthvdb

I now realize we can only mitigate the odd naming of the entity by setting the actual name in the entity options.

But even then the device name prefix - if wanted (!) included in the name - is still stripped out before displaying the name.

Petro suggested in his deleted answers to fake it with a . or anything else. But I still not get it as written often in this thread. If it would be display as, everyone has the chance to have it display as he want, with our without device name at the beginning. With the current solution only those, who always like it without device name have it build in and don’t have to care about manual renamings in some cases but all the other don’t have any chance to have it displayed as they want.

[Mariusthvdb (Marius)]

yeah, but this is no way of opening a discussion… see this or that link…

you need to provide the issue at hand, give examples and screenshots of what you intend to bring across.
essentially repeat the problems described in this thread. It’s a complete different medium, GitHub mods/devs wont jump back and forth to the community.

Also please keep that (each) discussion civil, even if you feel mad…
I mean, imho, it is a really bad way of misforming the users set entity names, and yes, I feel very frustrated too the system/devs think(s) it is the preferred way to go forward.

Nevertheless we are where we are with this, and we need to argue and not call names.

[petro]

And you’ve completely missed my point. I’m not defending the feature, just describing how it (and other naming areas of HA) works. Y’all are acting like I made the feature and are bitching at me like I made it this way on purpose. I’m leaving the conversation because I’m sick of posts like yours, so thanks for reminding me why I left this convo.

FYI, we haven’t seen an increase in good contributors leaving, not sure where you’re getting that idea from.