I’m creating this post to raise awareness for newcomers because it seems that many people have issues finding entities on their system.
If you are not finding an entity in the entity list in your devices or integration, chances are you can find it in the developer tools → states page. In fact, most YAML configured entities will show up here, but will not show up in an integration page.
Why not “fix” that to give a better experience to new comers? I.e. ensure you don’t need to go to something called “Developer Tools” in order to see all the entities in your system. This suggestion is purely about increasing appeal and reducing usability friction. Otherwise checking in Dev Tools is admittedly pretty simple.
You can see all entities in every entity list. 9 times out of 10 a new user doesn’t understand the difference between an entity and a device and they are just looking at devices.
This is something that won’t change until all yaml integrations are moved into the UI.
I always thought that was what the devices and entities tabs were for after going to devices & services. That or searching for entities using the shortcut keys.
e = bring up a search bar to search for any entity
c = quick navigation, I use this a lot as there can be a lot of mouse clicks to get to one place or another
Regardless, both have helped me save a little time, hopefully it will be useful to some new users reading this as I thought it was magic when I accidentally hit the e key one day. As far as I know this only works in a browser and not the mobile app but please let me know if I am mistaken.
icon.
