Organize and Customize Home Assistant

Organize Home Assistant

Home Assistant’s dashboard user interface is called Lovelace. By default, Lovelace will organize your devices for you. You can see this in the Overview tab after you have connected a few devices to your system. This tab can be organized however you like it by taking control of your Lovelace UI, which is a straightforward process.

1. From your Overview tab, click the 3 dots in the upper right hand corner of the Home Assistant window and click Edit Dashboard.

2. You will be prompted with a short blurb about taking control, if you’re sure you want to proceed, click Take Control.
3. You will be taken back to your Overview tab, but with some newly added controls.
   • The boxes with devices, weather, streaming info, etc. are called Cards.
   • You can edit your cards by clicking the Edit button below each card.

4. From the Entities Card Configuration page, you can change the title as well as which entities you want included.
5. Remember to always save your changes.

6. Cards can be deleted by pressing the menu icon on the card, and selecting Delete card.

7. Clicking on the +Add Card in the bottom right-hand corner will give you the ability to add new cards to your dashboard.
8. You can customize the title, what entities show up, and header toggle, among other things.

9. Clicking the + at the top of the page will allow you to add new tabs to your dashboard.

10. Clicking the x in the top left, will close the editing screen and return you to your normal Overview page.
11. Now you can enjoy a tidier dashboard.

Customize Home Assistant

There are two ways to customize your entities in Home Assistant. One way works for devices that are supported through the Integrations menu, while the other is required for manually integrated entities. Both ways will utilize icon names, which look like this:

mdi:fan
OR
hass:fan

Icon names come from materialdesignicons.com, which is where the mdi part comes from. I assume the hass part comes from a locally sourced collection of icons included with Home Assistant. I would try using hass first, then if it doesn’t work, use mdi. In the grand scheme of things, though, I don’t think it matters even a little bit.

You can also use this site to find icons: https://mdi.bessarabov.com/. It is a more efficient site for searching mdi icons.

Customize Integrated Entities

1. To change an entity’s icon, select the entity.
2. From the entity page, click the settings cog in the top left of the window.

3. On this page you can customize the entity. For icons, remember to check out materialdesignicons.com or https://mdi.bessarabov.com/.
4. Remember to save your changes!

5. If you change the entity’s name, you will lose it from the dashboard card. All you have to do is edit the card and change it to the new entity name.

Customize Manually Integrated Entities

If you’re unable to customize your entity that way, and see this prompt, you can customize the entity using the customize menu. To do so, you will first need to prepare your configuration.yaml. This example will show you how to change your entity’s icon.

homeassistant:
  customize: !include customize.yaml

1. Open your configuration.yaml file, add the customize line, and save.
2. In File Editor‘s Browse Filesystem menu, click the page on the top left of the menu to create a new file.

3. Name the new file customize.yaml. This is where your customization settings will be kept.
4. Validate your configuration and restart Home Assistant.

5. Navigate to the Customizations menu.
   • Configuration -> Customizations.

6. Choose the entity you want to customize.
7. Pick the attribute you would like the change.
8. Save your changes. For icons, remember to check out materialdesignicons.com or https://mdi.bessarabov.com/.

9. The changes should go into effect immediately or when the device’s status changes again.

Conclusion

The flexibility provided by Lovelace can help your dashboard be as unique as your smart home.