It’s great now we have more and more integrations to be configured through the friendly GUI. However sometimes we still need to do bulk editing, for example changing the “transition time” of all my 20 yeelights, or changing the settings of all my 5 cameras.
Currently these settings are burried deep and you’ll have to click 6 times for each editing of a device (3 to get there, 3 to get to the next one), it is a pain in the butt for sure.
The solution is maybe adding the ability to do bulk editing all devices in a flat list in one page, or even better just offers the yaml mode just like the lovelace editor.
Good one. Would really like to be able to change names, entity IDs, icons and disable/enable in some kind of table. UI form, yaml edit, even export/import csv would be fine, just not many individual popup windows.
Honestly, this is my biggest complaint about the “no yaml” push.
I understand the “user-friendliness” of having everything configurable by GUI, but getting rid of yaml has made it really difficult to do things “in batch”, IMO.
I have 20+ reolink cameras that I want to integrate, but even the idea of having to walk through the GUI config flow for each and every camera prevents me from doing it.
In the yaml days, I could have popped open the config in VIM, quickly edited it in-batch to reflect what I wanted, (which would be really simple since I could basically just copy the DNS entries from my cctv subdomain), restarted/reloaded the relevant component of HA and gone about my day.
Now, that same flow would take several hours of popup-by-popup navigation, copy/pasting, manual checking/testing, etc.
For many power users, our editors are the most powerful things in our toolbox, and the yaml deprecation effectively chucks them out the window, to the detriment of being able to trivial bulk configs/edits like this.
I don’t know if the underlying code would support it, but I would like to see the concept of a global variables file that any automation or yaml file could reference. For example, the OP wanted to change the “transition time” of 20 yeelights. With the global variable concept, this would be trivial.