Agreed that this should be changed. I can think of several situations where a live preview is undesirable (or even dangerous). Here’s a few off the top of my head:
Water shutoff valves that close if a leak is detected. You have to be careful to never edit the scene while someone is showering or your dishwasher’s running.
Scenes with climate controls. I don’t want to change the HVAC to heat just because I’m editing a winter scene in the summer.
Anything involving a security system. I can’t edit my ‘Away’ scene that arms my alarm to away without accidentally triggering with a motion sensor.
Lighting. This one is a bit more obvious, but you can’t edit a scene that turns off the lights if a person is currently using them.
My temporary workaround is to only edit scenes like this in the generated yaml rather than in the UI. That said, from time to time I still forget an accidentally trigger a scene through the editor.
I’m a fan of the “preview button” idea mentioned above to preview a scene when desired.
Same. I run into the situation where I am adding or editing one of my lighting scenes and I’m asked every time why I am messing with the lights in the house. Ugh! Would be nice to create or edit scenes in the UI without activating the scene.
Especially when so many people are working from home at the moment. The only chance I get to work on the HA implementation is with other people in the house / after dark.
Also the ‘why the hell has XX not worked’ only to be followed by ‘stop turning the lights off’ when trying to tweak something.
It also seems such a trivial feature to implement.
Any news on this one? I love the UI editor, but loading a scene on edit is not workable and sometime dangerous A “preview” like option would be really great!
This is needed! I HATE that I have to wait for everyone to be out of the home to start tweaking that ONE scene that needs it via GUI.
In addition, I would like and “advanced” dropdown for each entity that is part of the scene that allows me to toggle on/off whether I want the setting to be stored as a part of the scene.
For example:
I set a scene for evening, where I want to turn on lamps, BUT I also have adaptive lighting installed. I want to be able to turn the light on, but I don’t want to set the brightness or coloring. At 7pm in winter it could be 30% and 2750K but in summer it might be WAY higher than that (95%?) and 5000K.
Right now I have to go into the file editor and edit the yaml of the scene and reload it. It’s OK, but it would be much more user friendly in the GUI.
Something to ask me what properties of each component I would like to remember for the scene if I toggle “Advanced Mode” or whatever would be perfect.
EDIT: After months/year+ of struggling I have moved ENTIRELY to scripts which allow the above to be implemented effectively.
How would we actually get this logged for development? Surely this could be broadcast to a bit more direct audience, this is a pretty central UI request/improvement.
Yeah I just woke up all 3 of my kids by accident simply by editing the wrong scene. This is terrible. I really like the functionality but it shouldn’t just apply the scene by editing it! There should be a live apply switch so you can mess with it and see how it is (or not if you’re messing with it when it will impact people or impact things happening in the house) or edit it offline.
It works how I’d expect it to.
The same way as setting lutron scenes or scenes in many other systems. It’s so you can see the effect of what your editing.
That said, a toggle button for live preview wouldn’t go amiss.
Hadn’t seen this feature request until now but 100% agree. I turned all my scenes into scripts because of this since I would go to look at them and they would activate. After a couple times of accidently activating them I decided they had to go, can’t be waking people up to edit scenes.
I would strongly recommend the following changes:
Do not activate the scene on entry. Instead have a preview button at the top.
When adding or editing a device/entity to the scene offer the user two alternatives: Capture the current state of the device/entity or manually set the desired state as yaml
I think capturing the current state of the device is a good addition. It gives a completely code/yaml free approach to making scenes and is inline with what competitor applications offer. I just don’t like that tweaking the scene or even just looking at what its doing currently requires activating it. It would be nice if you could add one light to it in isolation or tweak the brightness of the lights without touching/activating the covers/switches/etc. that are working fine.
I have my computer screens on a smart switch. When setting up my scene to “turn of my studio”, my screens went dark and I could not continue the setup. Enacting live states during setup is dangerous and I cannot think of any rational reasons why this would be desirable (except maybe that it was easier to program I suppose). Please give us an option to turn of live states in the editor or turn it off altogether. I would like to be able to set the states without the states being enacted (like in any other smart home app). I am sure most users will want that too. That said, keep up the good work of creating an awesome open source app. Cheers!
“The Principle of Least Surprise” helped Apple grow to success with their products.
Now, I’m no fan of Apple, but nonetheless they did do some very smart things, and that is one of them.
Please give careful consideration to making the scene editor also not unpleasantly surprise anyone, by including the option of choosing whether to edit ‘live’ or ‘on-screen’.
I am here also to state the obvious of why this isn’t a thing after 2 years. I mean, c’mon… how is this not seen as legitimate??? Scenes are basically useless for me because there is no state management, so you never know what is stored vs what device state is. Terrible design decision on this.
Fully agree. My idea: let’s all put comments with a link to this thread under every subsequent HA release blog post until the guys will notice. I’m not sure if they are aware of this being an issue.
A “preview” like option would be really great!