Fast Search Card - An Open Source visionOS-Inspired Dashboard for Home Assistant

[fastender]

My Christmas Gift to the Community

Hey everyone!

I’m excited to share something I’ve been working on as my Christmas present to this amazing community: Fast Search Card - a completely open source Lovelace card that might change how you interact with Home Assistant.

GitHub: GitHub - fastender/Fast-Search-Card: A search card for Home Assistant

Youtube: https://youtu.be/GDTA6Qx5IxE?si=aLpJFlgWnUgwMcKh

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Why I Built This

We’ve all been there - spending hours (or days!) designing the perfect dashboard, arranging cards, creating views, and tweaking layouts. I love Home Assistant, but I noticed we were losing so much time on frontend design when we could be automating our homes instead.

Fast Search Card solves this: If you’ve done the work in the backend (assigning areas, labeling devices properly, organizing your entities), this card automatically creates a beautiful, fully functional dashboard in less than a minute. No YAML wrestling, no endless card configuration - just instant access to everything.

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What Makes It Special

Lightning-Fast Fuzzy Search - Find any entity, even with typos, powered by Fuse.js

visionOS-Inspired Design - Beautiful glassmorphism effects, fluid animations (Framer Motion), and 100+ custom animated icons

Integrated Control Center - Click any device to get:

• Interactive circular sliders for lights, climate, covers

• Real-time history graphs (Chart.js)

• Built-in scheduler with iOS-style time picker

• Related scenes, scripts, and automations in context

• Live toast notifications with visual feedback

Smart & Automatic - Categories, sub-categories by room, device type suggestions - all generated from your existing HA setup

Customizable Background Filters - Control brightness, blur, contrast, saturation, and grayscale right from the card

Fully Responsive - Works beautifully on desktop, tablet, and mobile

System Entity Framework - Built-in plugin system for extensibility (Weather plugin coming soon!)

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The Tech Stack (for the curious)

• Preact 10.x - Lightweight and performant

• Framer Motion - Smooth, native-feeling animations

• Vite - Lightning-fast builds

• Chart.js - High-performance history graphs

• IndexedDB - Client-side caching for instant load times

• Shadow DOM - Proper Web Components encapsulation

What makes this unique (IMHO): It’s not just another dashboard card - it’s a complete alternative interface for Home Assistant that respects your backend organization and turns it into a polished, Apple-like experience.

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Installation

Available via HACS or manual installation. Full docs on GitHub!

type: custom:fast-search-card

That’s it. Works out of the box.

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What’s Next & Support

I’ve documented everything extensively (5,000+ lines of docs!), including component APIs, plugin development guides, and architecture deep-dives. The codebase is clean, modular, and ready for contributors. I’d love to hear your feedback, suggestions, and bug reports!

If you find this useful and want to support future development (Weather plugin, AI improvements, performance optimizations, new features), please consider donating - you can find all donation options on the GitHub page. Your support helps ensure continued development and keeps this project 100% free and open source for everyone.

This has been a labor of love, and I genuinely hope it saves you as much time as it’s saved me. Happy holidays, everyone!

[WebPower (Karoly Papp)]

This turned out really beautiful! Congratulations! I will definitely try it after the break. Happy holidays!

[fastender]

I m thrilled to hear your positive comments. It means a lot that you took the time to try it out. As I have conducted only a few tests so far, I am very interested in your suggestions. If you encounter any improvement areas or bugs during your use, please let me know. Your feedback is crucial for optimizing the system further.

[sham (Shamim)]

Hi there! Thanks very much for this, it’s exactly what I have been searching for. Everything works, great. Couple of issues I’m facing, not sure if it’s me.

1. On mobile, I have set the cards to show in list view. Each time I go back into the app, it resets to square card view. Can this be set to remain in list view permanently? Per device config would be ideal!
2. In settings, some of the labels retain Dutch language even though I have set default language to English
3. The dimming function on lights seems to be hit and miss. Sometimes it dims sometimes not.

These are small niggles, but would be great if there are solutions.

I really appreciate all the effort you took to do this.

[fastender]

Hi Shamim,

Thank you so much for your kind message and for taking the time to share your feedback, it’s really appreciated!

Just a quick note: the app currently only supports two languages (English and German). Could you please make sure you’re on the latest version? That often resolves some of the smaller glitches.

I’m sorry to hear about the issues you’re experiencing:

1. The list view resetting on mobile

2. Some Dutch labels remaining in settings

3. The light dimming being inconsistent

These are all very valid points. This project takes a huge amount of time and effort, and my goal is to keep it as simple and beautiful as an Apple app while still being powerful. Unfortunately I don’t get much feedback, so messages like yours are incredibly valuable.

I’ll work on implementing fixes for these points over the next 10 days and will let you know once they’re ready.

Thanks again for your support. And it really means a lot!

[Ataru81]

Hi, nice work!!!

I've just installed it and done little testing.

I'm also finding some language problems: My HA is in italian so i searched for the right setting and putted in English. but there are still things that won't change.

Thanks for your work!!

[fastender]

Thats i needed, more feedbacks please; i will check the hardcoded peaces and do the translation; many thanks.

[Ataru81]

Still having the problems. Some labels are not translated. are there any variables or config to add?

I Also get this warning in configuration.

[fastender]

Both are fixed in the next beta (v1.1.1964):

• The "setConfig is not a function" editor warning is gone — Fast Search Card has no YAML options (everything is configured inside the card via the System Settings tab), so the visual editor now just shows an info screen instead of erroring. YAML type: custom:fast-search-card is all you need.

• The card ships German + English. It used to fall back to German for other HA languages — now it follows your Home Assistant language and uses English for anything that isn't German. So Italian HA → English labels instead of German. Full Italian translation isn't available yet, but it's on the list. You can also force the language in the card's Settings → Appearance.
  Enable HACS beta versions to test v1.1.1964.

[Ataru81]

can i help with the italian translation?

[Ataru81]

testing 1.1.2065

card in english but in settings there are german strings

[fastender]

today a new version will be avaiable, it is liquid time

[rafinesse]

Lovely theme, thanks a lot! Couple questions and remarks:

1. How can we change the card colors though? Can’t find a setting. It’s a lot of read depending on the setup
   

   

2. I can’t seem to get rid of a double calendar entry. Even hid the calendar entirely as an entity, not showing anymore in HA calendar, but still visible in FSC. Anyway to force refresh that stuff? I disabled/hid a couple more calendars while tidying things up and all of them still show up, even when deactivating them in FSC.

3. Handwritten splash screen has been omitted? I’m just seeing the greeting option.

4. It’s Sunday evening, I’m opening the calendar. I see empty Sunday (day view). I switch to week, I see the past week and not what’s upcoming Would need a) default view (week) and b) rolling over to next week if next event is in the next week.

5. How to set Custom View as default setting after greetings screen? Maybe I’m doing something wrong but it sometimes feels hit or miss getting there.

6. One more thing: Any chance to enable full page widgets as a home screen? Currently have to switch to another card to show full school schedule on one page.

7. Settings didn’t survive emptying cache (needed for another integration). All gone.

8. Just tested this on my tablet which is planned to be our control center in the future. In bento view, the bottom is cut off a little, with fully kiosk browser and kiosk integration hiding sidebar and top bar. Any chance to have some settings here for compact view? This is the case even with island hidden, space above stays empty.
   

   

Thanks again, great work!

[fastender]

Thanks a lot for taking the time to write this up - detailed feedback like this is exactly what shapes the card. Point by point:

1. Card colors - right now the tiles follow the glass/wallpaper look; you can tune the overall appearance under Settings → Appearance (background brightness, blur, contrast, saturation, custom wallpaper). A dedicated color/tint control for the cards themselves isn’t there yet - it’s on the list for the visual overhaul.

2. Stale / double calendars - you’ve found a real gap: the card’s entity cache doesn’t reliably refresh when calendars are hidden or disabled in HA, and there’s currently no proper force-refresh for it. You can try Settings → About → Clear cache, but the actual fix (respecting HA’s hidden/disabled flags + a reliable cache refresh) is on me. Noted as a bug.

3. Handwritten splash - that one was removed deliberately a while back: it added a fixed delay to every single load, and boot time won. The greeting stayed. I hear you though - noted as a possible opt-in comeback.

4. Calendar default view + rolling week - agreed on both. A default-view setting and “open where the next event actually is” go on the calendar list.

5. Default view after the greeting - fair point, that flow can feel hit-or-miss today. The whole start-screen experience is exactly what’s being reworked right now.

6. Full-page widgets as home screen - planned direction, yes. A full-screen widget / ambient layout aimed at wall tablets is one of the bigger items in progress.

7. Settings lost after clearing cache - the card is fully local by design (no server, nothing leaves your browser), so settings live in the browser’s site storage - and clearing that wipes them. I know that hurts; settings backup/export is on the list.

8. Tablet / kiosk cutoff + compact view - known issue with the current fixed-height layout. Wall tablets are the primary target going forward, so this area is getting real attention.

One general note: the card is still in beta, and a lot of what you touched on is being renewed in 1.1.3.0, planned for the end of this month. Thanks again - this kind of write-up directly influences what gets built.