Many add-ons (including from the ad-on store and HACS) give the ability to display an icon in the sidebar for new functionality - this is a huge leap in flexibility and configurability for the system.
However, when the sidebar is set to auto-hide many add-ons don’t show the ‘hamburger’ to unhide the sidebar after you open them. This gives the appearance of being stranded in the add-on as many times the back button cycles through things you’ve done in the add-on rather than taking you out of it. While it is true that you can swipe or mouse drag in from the left to open the side bar, the fact that the way to access the sidebar varies depending on which button you click in it is a bit counter-intuitive.
Similarly, many add-ons don’t echo the theme in use in the rest of HA, which can be jarring if you’re using Dark Mode and the add-on you open is bright white. This along with the menu issue makes the addon world feel a bit improvised sometimes.
Is it possible to have a standard ‘container’ with menu and style/theme support that add-ons could open into? It might be easier for people writing add-ons to provide a consistent look and feel that way without having to have the skills (/time/desire) needed to reproduce the HA interface.
I’m not sure if this made it to v 235 of the supervisor, but it’s there in dev at least so that is coming
As for the theme… Add-ons are running software that does not know what HA is, or how it works, there is no magic sauce that will “force” the theme to the software running inside an addon.
With that said, it is, however, possible for the developer of the software that runs in the addon to “steal” the look (colors) from the parent window (the software inside the add-on runs in an iframe) I know the Admin UI of the NetDaemon add-on does that, but that is not something that can be “fixed”/changed in Home Assistant since that would be up to the developer(s) of that particular software.
…OK…it seems you anticipated that one . Sorry for the incorrect terminology…what I meant to say is that there are ‘things’ in HACS and in the add-on store that end up creating buttons on the side bar…
I noticed that some of the windows now have a hamburger (although it’s smaller than stock - 20x20 vs 24x24; same with the title text), while some don’t so perhaps the change has been made.
Yeah, that makes sense for styles - I didn’t think that through very carefully. That said, maybe that could be templated and made available in the dev pages so people don’t have to figure out how to do it. I get the sense that many of the bright white themes were created to try and match the HA default colors.
. Sorry for the incorrect terminology…what I meant to say is that there are ‘things’ in HACS and in the add-on store that end up creating buttons on the side bar…