This remains an embarrassingly infuriating behavior. I am certain the attitude of existing “it would be a lot of work to fix it in the one way we proposed already” is not helpful. Scenes should open in in “read-only” for the states if needed, with a “enable live preview state to modify or display yaml” at least. I can’t see how that would require using the state engines snapshot when substituting a view only control describing the currently defined scene elements and/or letting a user get to the yaml editor without applying a state (especially ones that might include things like turning off computers that said individual might be using, or otherwise toggling unexpected entities when troubleshooting etc.).
Definitely this needs attention its impossible to create a scene in an automated house without states constantly changing due to activity in the house.
+1 for this feature change req
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Back here again, after plunging the house into darkness again, this time with a bit more knowledge and time.
aaaaaand… I entirely disagree with the stated answer that “this is a core issue, not a front-end one, so it’s really hard to fix”
Disclaimer: I’m not proficient in Polymer, and this is the first time I’ve really taken a look under the hood of the home-assistant interface, but I am a full-time senior front-end developer. I’m willing to be told the reason why what I’m reading here is not in fact the case.
I can see why the live state has been put forward as a reason, and I can see that the front-end is currently making use of the live state, and I can even see that there are good reasons for doing it that way, but if you take a look at the scene editor code it first loads the scene config (line 583) then applies the scene (line 606).
The current version then uses and modifies the live state in the view, but I can’t see any particular reason why it couldn’t be just referring to the data pulled in from the YAML file without having applied it.
I’d love to spend a weekend getting a dev environment set up and test my theory, but realistically that’s not likely to happen any time soon.
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+1. I can’t stress how frustrating it is when trying to edit a scene, especially scene’s involving lights that are constantly being triggered around the house. “excuse me honey, do you mind if we sit in complete darkness and not move at all while I make changes to my scene”. I hope to see this is top of the list for 2024.
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Use scripts instead of scenes and it’ll do exactly what you want right now. Yes I know this will not solve the scene problem, but it’s something you can do right this moment to achieve the exact same result. With a UI and all.
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+1 I freaked out my wife while modifying scenes the other day by turning off all the lights while she was showering. 
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+1, makes the scene functionality incredibly unattractive to use.
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Can you make actions (for Apple Watch or now CarPlay) from scripts the same way or similar to how it works for scenes? Or do you need to create an automation linking the id to the script you want to run?
+1 verry annoying, locked myself out when modifying sleep scene ( plug for core switch was off)
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A lot of talk here about not being able to edit scenes without activating them—which would be much more sensible design than the current, although fortunately I don’t care what my neighbors think, so I personally get nothing besides amusement wondering what they make of my outside lights flashing and changing colors at 2AM or in the middle of the day—but the other part of this thread was “improve scene editor”. I’m here to upvote being able to say “Add all my current lights” when creating a new scene, rather than having to add them (dozens of them) one by one.
I do actually have a custom card on my dashboard that gives the state of all lights to be copied and pasted directly into scenes.yaml, but I’d sure just like to be able to hit a button to do this within HA and not have to fire up my FTP client everytime I want to save the current lights as a scene. It is still much faster than creating a scene through the current UI in HA, though.
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definitely got surprised when my security camera started shouting at me, did not expect attempting to edit a scene would instantly apply it, it is NOT intuitive nor desirable, quite baffled this is being discussed since 5 years
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Yeah, I have to find the rare times that I am home alone to do wide spanning scenes. Please, PLEASE make this an opt-in feature!
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While everyone waits for this FR, you can get the behavior you desire in the UI using a script instead of a scene. It’s the same thing. You can even make it faster by having the things be called in parallel instead of series by using the parallel action.
Hi all
New to HA and agree this feature caused me confusion. Realised I’d not added a light to a turn off scene and tried to edit and everything came on. Thought I’d done something wrong.
In the posts above I see many comments suggesting voting for this change - sorry to be a dumbo but how do you do that ?
Regards
Andy
Scroll to the top of the topic and click the vote button.
Thanks. Done…461 votes now……
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Need this ASAP, great topic!
Okay this one really bugs me, so I’m putting on my work hat for this post. As a software product manager, I definitely appreciate how enhancements that may appear “simple” can require substantial dev effort. These often don’t add enough value to the product to be worthwhile. This one does.
The way the Scene Editor currently functions is unintuitive. It can easily lead to frustration, particularly for users who are less tech-savvy. It’s a highly visible, unfortunate blemish on a product that is otherwise incredible.
The Open Home Foundation clearly wants Home Assistant to grow and appeal to a broad audience in the smarthome space. All of us do! A critical requirement for user growth in this segment is minimizing frustration and confusion among your least technical users. Especially in the product’s core features.
And that’s why this request is such a big deal: most new users will interact with the Scene Editor. It’ll happen while they are still fairly new to HA and are actively forming an opinion about the product. This has the potential to sour them on the product as a whole, and that’s a shame.
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completely agree - the fact that the scenes now activate during configuration - leaving the house in the dark, at full lights, the AC’s blasting to 18C or heat up to 39C just because you want to be prepared for something… that is really annoying…
upvoted for the offline mode 
yeah I pretty much never use scenes as a result! Which is a shame as I would like to. But very rarely do I sit down to tinker with HA and am in a situation where I want to completely dork with my current home state to set up a scene. I also appreciate that there’s usually no simple fix with a program like this but here’s hoping it will get fixed at some point (and I do think it’s fair to say it needs fixing! It seems like it would be the equivalent of an automation acting out every edit you made to it).
That said can’t end without saying Fantastic work to the developers, thank y’all sincerely. As one example not being able to organize automations was a huge gripe I’d had for a while and that was taken care of in a recent update.
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