Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by MPSimmons 961 days ago
Home Assistant is an amazing project. I use it a ton, and I deeply appreciate what they've done.

HOWEVER, Lovelace specifically is pretty terrible. Having used Grafana extensively, trying to use Lovelace to arrange a UI is so far backwards that it's constantly grating to try to create or modify dashboards. I really wish there was a way to use Grafana as the UI and embed cards as panels. The ability to drag and drop, resize, and move UI elements would be a godsend, but instead it feels like I'm writing Tk-style UI arrangement in yaml, and it's awful, so I do it as infrequently as possible.

4 comments

Lovelace is pretty terrible, 1 hint I can give is to use vertical stacks, they're much easier to deal with for organizing where you want components in a given stack, then if you wanna move a component between vertical stacks go to the yaml view and cut it from source and paste it in the destination.

It's annoying to have to do a workaround like that but it makes it bearable at least.

On that I agree, giving what's possible with opensource UIs like Grafana's, it could be probably borrowed (I mean, the whole JS code) in Lovelace as well. But I guess there is some debt from early versions that makes that more complicated.
I agree the UI can be improved a lot but in my experience a truly well done smart home does not need a lot of UI. I have automated pretty much everything and only use Grafana to show some data. If you actually want to include Grafana panels in Loveloce... that actually works. I described how to do that on my blog here if you are interested: https://thesmarthomejourney.com/2021/05/30/add-grafana-to-ho...
That’s true. Lovelace needs js and css to look pretty. Most dashboards are terrible. I hope they dump it