It is very unrealistic to always assume tha you need to be programmer to use HA and keeping basic stuff in yaml is the right way.
If HA wants go the further and became more open to average people and become a real home automation platform then using programming lines for setup stuff is not the correct way.
If you want it to stay a development toy exclusively for limited number of people into programming than it can be kept that way.
Of course looking at the directions HA is going I can say they do have the ambition to become a standard in DYi home automation but that will take a lot of time.
I don’t know about other long-time users of HA, but I’m getting really tired about those “if HA wants to become…” arguments.
Why do people think we, users trying to help, care about that?
That is far beyond you and your understandings. Users wants beautiful and easy to use UI. Time is precious and nobody has enough to waste precious time in doing simple things in code.
And Yes Home Assistant want to be like that, like it or not but the simple user database is growing and prevailing so very short the demands will be very different from what you are used to.
Indeed, time is precious. Mine is better spent copy-pasting YAML code than clicking a bazillion time in some UI, really. If you think YAML is code, then you have no clue…
But whatever. I should just ignore this kind of posts. Adding "HA should become " to my blacklist…
If you firmly believe that then submit a Pull Request, in the appropriate GitHub repository, to implement it. The core developers will then decide if it should be added to Home Assistant. That’s how open-source software projects work.
A Feature Request isn’t much more than a suggestion (a wish) for someone else, with available time, interest, and software-development skills, to implement it. Basically, you have to convince someone else of the merits of your suggestion. Claiming you personally know what users want is unlikely to serve as justification for the FR.
I agree with koying that it has become tedious to read posts predicting a dire future for the project unless it follows their advice. Why? Because all of the ones I have seen over the last three years have proven to be wrong (its heritage of YAML configuration continues to play an important role and the project continues to attract developers and users ).
The irony is that this community forum isn’t even the best venue to debate Home Assistant’s future. Very few developers (namely the people whose contributions actually change the product) spend their free time debating things here. They’re on Discord and/or the Discussions section of the Architecture repo (where they submit proposals for concepts they wish to implement).
Again and again the same assuyyby everybody that users of HA are developers.
And again again I can see HA core fans resisting to accept that the development toy has to become a stable and complicated easy to use home automation platform at some time. This is the feature and what end users want and yaml will play less significant part in it.
While you’re waiting for your prediction to come true, read through the same prediction made by numerous users nearly two years ago (yet hasn’t happened).
You have to follow simple instructions and to type. By definition everyone who uses this forum can type (or has some other form of input mechanism which results in text).
Anyway, before the config UI reaches any level of actual generic usability, the1st FR that should be created is to be able to handle generic lists in the configuration UI.
Currently (as someone having actually developed for it), handling lists is ad-hoc and incredibly cumbersome. You’d probably notice that most of the integrations still in pure YAML, including core ones, use lists of some kind…
Also, just going to say that this argument doesn’t make sense. The average / new HA user isn’t going to need to create a “generic thermostat” they just want their existing thermostat to be supported.
Creating a thermostat from other entities is a more-than-basic action done by a user which requires a more-than-basic understanding of HA.
I also don’t see a problem with it remaining as yaml configuration
It’s in the link I posted for you to read seven months ago. It explains (in 2020-04-14) that certain integrations will be converted from YAML configuration to config flow (UI based). My post also explained why Generic Thermostat doesn’t fall into that category. Seven months later, configuring Generic Thermostat remains YAML based.
It may eventually be converted to config flow but the task is clearly not anyone’s priority. Even by the measure of Feature Request votes, it’s not in high demand.
1 year later I can see more and more post about requesting more features in the generic thermostat. Every new HA build removes more and more components that needed to be set from yaml and my file has gone much cleaner only with the generic thermostats left.
The new generic thermostat helper doesn’t allow control of a fan entity when in cooling mode, however this is possible when using YAML, so I’ve not been able to migrate my ‘cooling’ thermostats over to the new helper just yet.
