I find myself needing to search for devices quite frequently.
The Quick Bar feature now allows to search through entities and commands using the hotkeys ‘e’ and ‘c’ respectively. It is awesome!
Searching through devices using the Quick Bar would dramatically speed up my workflow.
Possible solutions:
another hotkey ‘d’ to specifically search through devices only
remove hotkey ‘e’ , and instead introduce hotkey ‘s’ or cmd+K to launch the Quick Bar and search through all relevant objects (entities, devices, automations, scenes, scripts, …)
tags: keyboard, shortcut, hotkey, quick bar, devices, search
I am in the process of setting up my devices. Example activities: rename devices, see which entities come with a device, rename entities, look at how I named entities from other devices for consistency, …
When setting up 20+ devices, switching between devices would be much faster using a hotkey ‘d’ compared to the many clicks it takes now.
Working with many tabs is one possible option, however that is not my preferred way of working as the amount of open tabs can quickly grow which makes it difficult to keep the overview.
I’d rather have a way to quickly switch between devices within one tab. A more elegant solution to my problem.
As the hotkey already exists for searching entities, and the hotkey ‘d’ is not linked to anything else currently, I assume it is a rather straightforward feature to implement.
More hotkeys indeed slightly increases the risk of accidentally typing a hotkey when a user starts randomly pressing keys. Not sure why that is relevant though.
In my view, the most elegant solution would be to have a single hotkey ‘s’ to launch the Quick Bar to search through all possible relevant HA objects and group them by type. Similar to e.g. Spotlight search on macOS:
Search results could be grouped by result type (e.g. entities, devices, automations, scenes, scripts, …) and groups could be sorted (e.g. entities would be on top).
However, I assume that such an omnipotent search bar would be quite a bit more complex to implement.
I extended my first post to add this second possiblity.
I really like this idea and I’m sad it didn’t gain traction. This is a major problem with the interface and it’s so obvious I cant believe practically every user hasnt pointed it out.
Why does it take so many clicks to get to the devices page, which is the ENTIRE POINT of a home automation system? It defaults to a home page, fine, but you have to click settings->devices and integrations (then it defaults to integrations, why?) then you have to click devices at the top, then click the search box, then FINALLY, you’re there.
I hate having such a passionate complaint because the work done on this project has been god-tier, but this one element is so obvious I do not get why it exists this way.
Now, I’m somewhat early on in my search to fix this issue, and this thread is 3 years old, so maybe there’s a solution by now I haven’t found. I wasn’t even aware of the quick menu for entities, but OP is totally right DEVICES should be the default. You can see all the entities from a device’s page in a single click, but the process for getting to the device from the entity is convoluted.
My problem is slightly different than OPs and I’d endorse his “d” hotkey, but it doesn’t solve the problem on mobile (literally 5 clicks once in the app - all on opposite ends of the phone/UI I might add)
I’m exploring having a custom card that links to the URL of the devices page, but that is not a perfect fix. I’m still digging, but hope there is some solution here.
Many entities do not belong to any device, so I’m not sure I agree. Also the status page containing entities is slow, so I would not want that as a default either.
But if I do feel the need to go to a device, usually I do so by clicking an entity on the dashboard or search for it and use the top right menu to go to the device.
But I too am curious, what do you need the device pages for so often?
Please don’t yell. For me, the entire point of Home automation is, well, that things happen automatically. So I should not need to go there too often. But if I do, dashboards are the main interaction, and or the scripts and automation lists when I automate stuff.
My apologies for raising my voice, I should have bolded, just wanted to emphasize it
Interesting point about some entities not having a device, but I guess my point is that while devices contain entities, the logical way most people will think about components will be the physical devices they add to their system (which contain one or more entities). Moving to HA this was not intuitive, but I’ll admit it makes sense and is likely the best way to do it.
I agree the point is to make things happen automatically, but when something goes wrong, I don’t go search for the entity (who’s name is often not intuitive), I search for the motion/temp sensor that I think might be the problem, and look at it’s temp/motion status…
A universal quick search (for pc and mobile) would be invaluable to fix my problem, but also just super useful I think
I make sure my entity names are logical, at least the ones you are most interested in.
Automating based on devices is not advisable. You should use entities as much as possible. It is also the entities you show on the dashboard. Entities can be found using the search box in the top right of the dashboard, if they are not already on the dashboard.
But indeed, devices do group entities that belong together, so they do have their use. But while using HA more, I add a lot of template entities that do not appear at any device. So I learned to rely less on devices.
