This is an open source project. People do things for free. And in most cases they do what they’re personally interested in, not what someone wants. A random dev won’t take this topic unless he/she needs it as well AND has proper skills to solve it. This is about HA Core functionality and it’s complex, believe me.
However it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to bring attention as Frenk suggests to open a Feature Request which we did and waiting for it to be implemented. This year Paulus promised to focus on stremlining HA experience. This Scene editor is a perfect place to be improved. Hopefully they’re gonna pick it up and fix this.
I already know it’s complex and I know the main reason it hasn’t been picked up.
Complexity doesn’t mean that a volunteer can’t pick it up. Getting upset because feature request you want hasn’t been implemented doesn’t help the situation.
I add my vote to this too, perhaps it gets picked up with the new main goal for 2022 to rework the UI and make things more accessible.
I have also not expected that changing a scene (or duplicating it which means edit it first) is activating the scene as well.
Anyhow, sometimes things take time and there are always other options to fix a problem, also in HA
Telling people “go do it yourself” doesn’t help either, and at this stage it has become a “go screw yourself” kind of thing. 99% people that need this doesn’t have the ability to do it themselves.
Can the following be added to this request?
“Scene editor should not pick all entity properties”
Setting an entity icon, name, effect_list, current, current_consumption, supported modes etc on a scene is just ridiculous and a call for bugs and unexpected behaviours.
This scene editor is dangerous, there is no other way to call it.
I’m not telling people to do it themselves. Maybe you didn’t understand my post. The take away should be: If you can’t do it yourself, you have to wait. That’s it. It’s not rocket science. You’re complaining to volunteers… Hopefully you see how far that will get you.
You may not wanted to mean that, but you literally wrote that:
Also, that post was, in my opinion, completely unnecessary. People already know the options: wait or do it yourshelf, don’t need a moderator to step in and say what has been said hundreds of times already.
On top of that, all your posts look very aggressive to me, which doesn’t help to get a constructive and friendly thread.
I’m tired of this argument. I am not complaining to any specific volunteers, I am complaining to the HomeAssistant project, which has a company behind it, with paid developers and the one I give my money every month. If express my opinion on which things I consider to be more important and why it’s considered “complaining” this is probably one of the more unfriendly projects I interacted with.
Yes, I was making it clear what options you have. Many people are unfamiliar with open source. Especially when…
The post that dragged me into this was a first time poster. Their sole purpose was to join and complain and someone found that offensive and flagged it. I had no choice but to reply. Sorry, but that’s how moderation works.
Also, my post is meant to be read without any emotion placed behind it. I’m not a marketing guru and I can be quite blunt. Sorry if it comes off as aggressive but it’s not meant to be.
Paying money does not make your issues have more priority than other users issues.
Just wanted to pop in and say I think this feature is critical to getting the folks who the GUI is mostly targeted at (non-power users) using scenes.
It confuses the heck out of everyone and turns them off of home assistant when we show them that to create a scene using the GUI you have to set the scene at the time of editing it.
Not that many are creating scenes, but it makes the process more difficult than say Automatons.
I think this is at the root of a lot of the recent interactions in the forum which often seem to boil down to “you should be smart enough to deal with this, it’s open source”. For a lot of us, myself included, I can work around almost anything. Worst case I write a bunch of Python - I already have an open source console project that I built and maintain to the turn of 100K LOC so no big deal. BUT - and it’s a big but - contrary to the idea held by many of the volunteer support folks here (and thanks for that support - I am not in any way belittling your efforts) HA is clearly being transitioned to serve a broader market than us geeks. Things like the hardware offerings and the move away from YAML are clearly efforts to reposition it to serve a broader community of lesser expertise. This scene thing is, from that perspective, a bug plain and simply. No one expects that going into a configuration editor is, in and of itself with no user assent, going to start changing settings. Yet this is what the current system does. I really think it would behoove all of us to start to think a bit more about the more naïve user and what they expect. The recent turmoil around breaking changes was another instance of this issue. When you have a hardcore HA pioneering community the “breaking changes of the month” and deprecation with 3 months notice is ok. When HA gets to the general purpose user community as target you’ll need to be thinking in terms of years to breaking changes just like every other consumer good. Today we are somewhere in the middle - but the sooner we as a community recognize that this change is ongoing and figure out how to negotiate it without huge fights, the better. My personal guess is a move to a much more supported “stable” version that has a supported change cycle measured year or more transitions and a leading edge version for the aggressive crowd but there are probably other models that would work. What I do know is that the current model isn’t going to work to reach that larger audience.
I just want to point out that if I use the OEM app for my lights, I set the room the way I like it, then create a scene. So it seems that HA is not unique in the way it creates scenes. I bet Tuya is the same way, but I ever tried it.
This feature request has been open since 2019 and sadly not yet implemented…
Home Assistant Scene Editor S#CKS!
Why would it EVER be a good idea to launch a scene when opening it to edit it? Also, as OP stated, it would be nice to have an option to do all the editing WITHOUT controlling the devices. I rarely, if ever, need them to actually be controlled when setting up a scene. PLEASE add this to your 2022 usability improvements!
While you are at it, a total revamp of the editor would be great. I understand that many devices have extended controls so there can’t be a one design fits all solution, but there has to be a better way to display device settings (on, off, brightness, etc) and ideally change them, without having to click on each device.
I use this scene to quickly turn on all (or subsets of) my workbench instruments:
The UI doesn’t show whether the scene has the device turn on or off without having to click on each device individually, even the icon doesn’t change. Some other devices, like scenes with RGB lights, do a bit better by having the icon change to the color the bulb is set at.
And for those who will invite me to develop it myself… I wish I could contribute code to improve this, but I don’t know how to program at this level.
Was looking for exactly this.
Creating an “emergency” state scene and every time i edit it it triggers, thats so annyoing.
Then i need to go past each device and restore it’s origal state.
Well I mean the reason it doesn’t show you this is because the idea is that you’re looking at the device. The scene editor works by capturing the current state of the specified devices and recreating it when run. So it doesn’t need to show you the state of your multimeter because you can literally look at it to see what state its in. Whatever state the device is actually in right now when you’ve got this UI open is what’s in the scene.
So I guess my question here for you (and really anyone on this thread) is why not just make a script? Like this:
is a script. You pick actions that change your devices “offline” (so to speak) and then when executed it does what you told it to do.
In general scenes are really just scripts with a lot of restrictions on what actions are allowed. Really the only advantage a scene has over a script is that its really easy to make for someone that isn’t interested in doing anything that remotely resembles programming. Just put the stuff in your house in the state you want it in, list those devices in the scene editor and click save. No YAML, no services, no entities, no complexity. If you are someone that knows how to do service calls and write YAML then a script is strictly better then a scene.
Idk a year ago I kind remember becoming annoyed with this because I had a bunch of scenes that I had to convert to scripts to allow me to manage them like this (and I see my post in this thread at the time lol). But I guess given some time I’ve kind of realized that as annoying as I personally found it (since I am someone very comfortable in YAML), this feature is really the only selling point of scenes. If you make them editable offline in the editor as opposed to changing the devices in the real world then they’re just bad scripts.
So what am I missing? Why not just make scripts if you want “offline edit” capability?
And you answered your questions and doubts by this. Indeed scenes are sort of scripts in Home Assistants. But Paulus stressed out that he wants them to be the first class citizen in HA with the ease of use in the first place. They keep telling how much they want HA to be easy to use. There are lots of people who do not know YAML, do not know programming but still want to make their houses smarter. Scenes are the right tool for that, they are easy to use, many other systems implement them in a similar way - a GUI editor where you set the wanted state for each device, you save it and you call it. That’s they way it should work. The current behaviour is good only when you create a scene. But many people don’t want the scene to be automatically fired when they enter edit mode. As you see people here define extensive scenes that when applied - put their houses upside down only because they clicked the edit mode. It’s not user friendly. It’s not intuitive behaviour, it’s not a behaviour someone intentionally wants it to be. The way it works comes purely from technical reasons. They know this isn’t perfect, they know it could be better and refined, but for technical reasons it’s very hard to be changed. That’s all. And because of that I think scenes are not first class citizen in HA. Not yet. They can only be with an intuitive GUI editor that simplifies things, but not with an editor that changes states immediately when you enter it. Imagine the same happens with scripts - they fire as you define them. Terrible solution!
I personally defined a couple of scenes in YAML when there was no editor. I saw no big difference back then between a scene and a script or automation. I got used to scenes because I used them in other systems. They are usually a key part of a home automation system. In HA because there was no GUI editor - I barely used them. Once they introduced the GUI editor I tried it, saw that side effect and I do not want to use it anymore. It barely helps. I prefer an automation or a script - something that I can edit offline and test whenever I want. HA doesn’t run automations and scripts immediately when I start changing them. It would be ridiculous.
I think scenes will still be something in HA that is ‘interesting’, but because the GUI editor triggers a scene immediately after entering edit mode - people will not want to use it too often. It could really be the other way around if they only added this feature to be able to edit something without actually changing the states. I imagine in this case many automations would fire scenes as part of their logic. Even I do have something like this in my automations. Scenes seem to be more reusable than automations. They are more intuitive. They just lack the proper implementation.
You know what is always the best when you have doubts how to satisfy everyone? - give a choice to people. This feature request is about giving a choice, not about changing from one oppressive approach to another one. A small checkbox ‘Edit offline’ or/and a button ‘Preview’.
to rework the UI and make things more accessible.
