I am using Home Assistant more than 5 years now. It always felt a little bit weird to edit an automation by going to settings and finding the automations at there. HA at its core is an automation platform. It’s really cumbersome for a user to do more than 2-3 clicks to find a critical peace of home automation. It should have its own sidebar item. I believe Automations are as important as “Energy Dashboard” or even more important than"Logbook".
Additionally no other incumbent home automation system requires to “reload” whole automations when a slight edit made in an automation. We already click the “Save” why it’s not reloading automatically in the background?
You can, technically, get there with zero clicks using hotkeys:
It is also possible to add a Button card to any dashboard that navigates directly to the Automations page. If you were so inclined, you could always be 1 click away. But, if you really want a sidebar item that direct-links, that should be possible with the Custom Sidebar integration.
I would also challenge your thesis a bit. The official usage stats show that the average instance has 12 automations. That means there are probably a significant number of installs that have 0 automations. For those users, HA is not primarily “an automation platform”, it’s an all-in-one proxy for their wall switches and other physical device controls. If you spend any time on the HA Reddit you will also see that there are a significant number of users who prefer to use Node-Red (according to analytics, it’s the 8th most popular Add-On).
If you edit them in the UI, you haven’t needed to manually reload automations since at least 2021… clicking “Save” does reload the automation in the background. I don’t remember which update added it originally, but it was at least a year prior to it being modified in 2022.11 so that only the automation being saved is reloaded.
Thank you for a detailed explanation but the problem here is; HA has its own “Automations” module. So any third party automation add on should not be the first go-to solution for most of the users. If so, it leads either a marketing or a feature issue. Additionally a basic, not-so-technical user should not be adding custom sidebar addons or using 3rd party automation solutions on a smart home OS. That’s why HA should prioritize improving their Automations’ easiness to use level and reachability without any third party extension or a solution that requires users to add buttons to different places.
To simply put, no other well managed digital tool makes their users to add buttons or edit configurations to the system just to find an existing module.
As a 10-year experienced technical product manager, I would say that this also proves my thesis. If average automation count is so low, that means HA is hiding its own feature buried in some place. And if people are using another automation solution, also that means some critical features are missing in HA automations and users are looking for other solutions.
That was the case many years ago.
So many who installed HA many years ago probably installed Node Red to get around some issues and just have it still due to some automations have not been ported over yet.
I have this.
I don’t remember when I last added a new Node Red automation. I only use it now for things that is far easier than HA automations.
Like getting data from an API and manipulate it before adding it to a sensor.
Or reading files that is not possible in HA automations.
Interesting. I never noticed that, probably because I don’t use the UI to maintain my automations. Is there any way to reload just one automation which wasn’t updated in the UI? That would be a huge benefit, to me anyway.