YAML entity_id configuration for Template entities?

Hi all,

I’ve gathered from my searching of the forum and Google that it is up to individual integrations to allow configuration of an entity_id in YAML. I have a decent high-level sense of the historical context here.

Is there a way to set the entity_id for a Template entity? The closest I’ve come is that if I supply a name parameter that follows the rules of permissible entity_ids, the entity_id will be, for example for a binary sensor, “binary_sensor.[name]”.

This has two disadvantages that I haven’t been able to simplify:

(1) To the extent I want a friendlier name in the UI, I think I have to go into configuration.yaml and use the home assistant:customize method. That requires some extra baggage; and, also, I don’t think it’s possible to reload that customization without restarting HA.

(2) It requires me to specify BOTH a unique_id AND a name if I want to be able to customize the entity in the UI.

Despite the title of this post, as you can tell I do care about using the UI. But most of the meat of my automation is done in YAML; I just find that a lot easier with how I work. And it’s been a pain to have to go into the UI every time I create a new Template entity to rename it to follow my naming patterns before writing additional code.

Is there a solution that I’m overlooking here?

Would appreciate any pointers, or even suggestions for another approach if it sounds like I’m overlooking something. Thank you.