I started using HA about 2 months ago and use the GUI to create the dashboards. Looks good, but lacks exact control/placement of items. It looks other more advanced users code up their Dashboards and are able to add spacers, etc.
What is best method and what do most people use?
I do not have a ui-lovelace.yaml file in my main directory which is how I believe most people begin to code up their yaml for the GUI.
Would you recommend I convert to coding style or continue with GUI? Are there instructions on converting my GUI mode to code?
those two things aren’t necessarily going to (and likely won’t) get you the same answer.
“Most” people are likely going to be non-tech types who don’t want to actually code things so they are going to stick with the UI editor.
Advanced users will typically stay away from the UI editors but there are some users who’ve been around a long time that like the UI editors. A few (inexplicably) use a hybrid between the two.
I personally use yaml to code everything unless I’m forced to use the UI (integrations and such) but I wouldn’t way I have an “advanced” dashboard tho.
Obviously that’s a personal preference but I find the code style is more “satisfying” and I seem to have a bit more fine grained control.
not that I know of but it’s pretty straight forward.
You’ll see I use an included file for my resources but if you don’t want to use that just list all of the resources under that key.
then create a ui-lovelace.yaml file in your config directory.
open the UI editor and go to the spot where you can edit the yaml manually (raw editor or whatever it is) and copy everything in there to the ui-lovelace file.
restart HA and you should (hopefully…) see no change in your dashboards.
Of course, I could be wrong about that since I’ve never actually done it. But I don’t think I am.
if for some reason it fails then just remove the “lovelace:” entry from your configuration.yaml and restart and everything should return to the previous functionality.
