Thanks for the link. It makes it somethings clear.
Honestly, there are hardly any valid use cases for being able to control lights from your phone except for showing off.
Just this sentence was sounded off for me. There is a context behind (Perfect Home Automation - Home Assistant). Thinking that for a lot of things in HA it’s the only way we can interact.
dont they already have this:
to make the configuration easy for the easy stuff?
I agree with your view, a configuration UI it is the first step. HA is nothing without the components, it needs to be easy to add them. It’s kind of making hard to get gas in your car.
Tools like HASS Configurator need to be view as a temporary fix. And I believe they are.
For basic simple things, there is no advantage at all to make the user type a text file. It would actually reduce a lot of issues.
They do have the config. It works really if you want to change a single thing. It’s limited that makes yaml look attractive (sorry I couldn’t resist).
but that is exactly it.
the yaml isnt difficult at all when you just only want to do the basic stuff.
if i point a 12 year old to the components list and ask him to create a few entities in the config, he can do most of them (the simple once at least, lights, switches, input_booleans, most sensors, etc.) if i tell him the basic rules from yaml.
i dindnt like yaml when it came to doing more complicated stuff. complicated automations, templates that use jinja, etc.
but there is no easy way to make a gui for that. if at all.
good automating and using the devices you own to your full advantage is just not for everybody.
and the more you let it seem easy, the more people will get frustrated by it.
thats why i say:
give people an easy tool that can only do basic stuff.(add lights, switches and let it turn on on a specific time, etc) and tell them that if they want to do complicated stuff they need to learn, learn and learn more and spend a lot of time and energy on it.
i see a lot of people here complaining that it isnt easy to do things like playing music when they come at home on all kind of devices, while tts tells them welcome and the lights get dimmed and the coffee machine starts running.
sorry but that kind of stuff doesnt come without time and efford and a lot of learning, unless you buy stuff from 1 company that already did a hell of a lot of work to combine those functions for you.
Completely agree with you however, whilst not everyone has a need to use a CAD program, not everyone feels the need to automate their homes.
I think a much more UI friendly setup would be great but feel like a lot of this is dependant on the third parties you’re trying to attach to Home Assistant. For example, I don’t think a lot of components can be auto discovered so you’re going to have to dish up your IP address, possibly port number as well at a minimum. I feel like if you know how to do this you’re going to be able to work out how to edit a text file.
On the other hand, a setup UI like that of OpenHAB would make everyone’s life a lot easier rather having to worry about editing text files.
I agree that it would be nice if HA worked towards having a menu of components that you can choose from and simply click the ‘add’ button to integrate that component into HA. From there you would then click into that component to configure it, all without typing a single bit of yaml or even looking at a config file. Thats the kind of GUI that my Vera had but unfortunately the hardware was total rubbish so I literally threw it in the bin.
looks pretty good for the price. I would happily pay that sort of money for HA if it was as polished, just for the software with me supplying the hardware as I have now. Looks like there is only the Euro version though so the zwave frequency wouldn’t suit me here in Australia
My biggest complaint with HA has always been the lack of comprehensive documentation.
The problem is that “you don’t know what you don’t know”. If you don’t know that (for example) that a configuration key exists how do you know to look it up somewhere. The documentation has a lot of the basic configuration stuff documented but there is a ton of stuff that isn’t there and they somehow expect you to “just know” that it exists.
I can’t say how many times I’ll be looking over the forums and someone throws out a question and the answer is completely non-intuitive and not included in the docs.
And as to where jinja templating is concerned that is another complete can of worms. There is pretty much no way that even the average somewhat tech-savvy user will be able to comb through the voluminous jinja documentation (of which most isn’t applicable to most situations we will encounter) to try to figure out the syntax/commands for a specific circumstance. I know. I’ve tried many times and have given up in frustration and then had to throw myself on the good will of the forum. (thanks for everyone’s help, BTW).
just my two cents worth. and that’s probably more than it’s worth too. 
There’s a template checker in dev tools and I do play with that to see if I have the right syntax. Also there are many many peoples github configs you can look at well. But yes it’s not intuitive. Not sure how to fix that. The forum and discord are the solution there.
You see this is what I think a lot of people are missing in this thread. This is an open source community and as such a lot of the “documentation” is going to be found on the forums and other support channels. Of course once you get your answer, you should probably click on the button “Edit this page on Github” and update the docos yourself. That is a way us non programmers can contribute - we don’t all have to have the abilty to program python.
Yeah open source authors are notoriously hopeless at documentation. This project is actually pretty well served I thought. How many people here have actually clicked on the Docs link Documentation - Home Assistant and methodically gone through the topics from top to bottom?
Like any open source community, there are also marvellous people like BRUH and DrZZs and others who put up blog and video howtos. Frankly they are part of the documentation too.
I have not had any problem at all getting any component I have tried to work. The component docs are good, each one has really easy to follow example yaml code.
Automations and scripting I find harder, and I agree that node-red is a better fit for most people.
I totally agree with the comments about documentation. I’m another one of those “been in IT for >20 years” people who REALLY struggled to get HA up and running (but I’m so glad that I did). At first glance the documentation at https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/ seems comprehensive and well organised but when you try to follow any of it as a complete beginner you quickly realise that there isn’t enough there to get you started. I was totally reliant on the kind and knowledgeable souls on this forum to get me up and running (for which I am eternally grateful, as I think HA is a great product).
It would be really useful if https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/ contained detailed step-by-step guides for getting started which are targeted at beginners - i.e. which assume little or no prior knowledge. For example, some complete example configs with a full explanation of each element.
Hunting around in forums is often fruitless as you often pick up fragments of information in each domain but cannot piece it all together to create a working solution (to even a small requirement).
In the “old days” of software development there used to be two major types of documentation for software:
So something like this where people post their entire working configuration? https://www.home-assistant.io/cookbook/
I do think that the cook books are helpful.
But only if you are at a level where you can reverse-engineer what’s shown in them already because they - at least the ones I’ve looked at - don’t adhere to the ‘old days’ principle of writing code either:
I fully understand why that is. I do the same: I just want to get my stuff working.
But that’s where my love-hate-relationship with the Agile Manifesto come to play: Working software over comprehensive documentation.
And ‘comprehensive documentation’ means something different for everybody
Especially in a community project like this one.
i never found them usefull.
i can get 1000 better configs on github that show things that are more clear.
how the hell would a list of config yamls from others help me if i dont know wahet to look for and if it doesnt say what is in the config? (not to mention that they are probably outdated a week after they are placed)
so yeah, a list of working configs would be helpfull, if you could be sure it is up to date and when there was a description more then the owners name. (but that is almost impossible to check with a 14 days update)
you mean something like this? Getting started - Home Assistant
This is what the component pages are for, find your config example then compare it to the component page and you have your detailed explanation. Integrations - Home Assistant
this list will tell you which ones are updated most recently:
Those links have more than configuration yaml. They are full configurations. They are all on github anyway.
Please help us by submitting such documentation then - much (probably most) of the documentation has been submitted by people other than the developers.
As a noob I did find seeing other peoples configs very useful BUT, what I think I would have found even more helpful is to be able to see what components people were running before clicking on the links. That way I could narrow down whose would be most relevant. There are a number of set ups which were not of any help because they have nothing similar to me. I ended up clicking on each one manually writing a list of those peoples configs with similarities to mine. Imagine it I had to use a pen and paper!