Why the heck aren't groups UI-configurable?

I appreciate that groups can be changed without a restart as long as you stash them in groups.yaml. But I would really like groups to be configurable right from the UI without needing to drop into YAML. Would be great to be able to use UI-driven pickers to pick your entities instead of copying and pasting things from dev tools.

That should be included given the other things that are doable via the gui. However typing is not that hard, you typed a message here, you can do so in an editor :slight_smile:

To put it another way, I’d rather the short supply dev time is spent on big issues and bugs, I’d see it as “nice to have, but not essential”.

I disagree - it is a major usability improvement which will allow more people to do more with their Home Assistant and more people brings a wealth of new ideas that can lead the project from strength to strength.

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Whole point of Home Assistant is making things easier and in my case, laziness :joy: so adding as much as possible to the GUI saving the need to go into yaml is always a good thing in my opinion :slightly_smiling_face:

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I mean its fair but like the main post says, the point is just to call out WTH moments to build a backlog, there’s no guarantee the devs will spend their time fixing any particular one soon. I think this qualifies, I leave the priority of it to the dev team.

I would like to add though that the simpler the feature is the more of a WTH it is when you find its not exposed in the UI. You’re right, it is pretty simple to make a group in YAML and in general groups are a pretty basic feature. Which is kind of exactly why I did a double take when I realized the configuration screen has no way to make them.

Making what easier? Whole point of Home Assistant is to automate your home :slight_smile:

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Agree.

That’s not true, people can configure groups, the functionality is there, it’s just not configurable through the UI.

And your life

True, totally forgot that, probably because it makes life easier for me and my family, but at the same time it made life “harder” for me considering the countless hours I spent caring about my best friend called Home Assistant :joy:

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I agree. A lot of parts of HA are written in unfriendly way, while it could be the opposite with a bit of good will.

However imo setting groups in files is not that bad. The worse is what comes next and is inevitable: HA restart

+1 groups. :ok_hand:

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No you do not need to restart HA for changes to groups. See server controls, below the restart panel is “Reload Groups”

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You are right. I wasn’t aware about it. It must have been added somehow recently.
Thanks

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Probably old news for many, but I just noticed the group.set service:

Won’t survive a restart, and no documentation that I can find other than the parameter descriptions there. But good to know there’s already mechanisms in place for making groups dynamically from the UI.

+1
This feature would be very useful.

I was searching for that, too bad it’s not there. Shouldn’t be that much programming I think?

Nor is it that difficult to set up a group.

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If you aren’t new to HA and like to yaml a lot risking typos or screw up your config by mistake.

I prefer built in creation

Awaiting your PR then :wink:

Still thinking,…

I’m not a programmer but if you can do automations in UI then groups should be possible right.