2024.1: Happy automating! – Home Assistant

The automation editor got some love for this release, with many small
improvements to make it easier for both new and long-time users.

As there are many small improvements, let’s go over them individually.

PS: One quick note: all changes are UI changes, meaning that these changes
do not affect the underlying automation configuration. All your existing
automations will continue to work as they did before.

If you start with Home Assistant, visiting the automations dashboard would
result in an empty page. That is not very helpful if you see this for the
first time. So, we’ve improved that!

You are now greeted by the little automation robot that explains what an
automation is and references to the documentation that can help you get started.

A small but effective improvement to help new users get started. We have also
applied this same improvement to the scripts and scenes dashboards.

When starting a new automation from scratch, you used to be greeted by some,
possibly, new terminology and almost a blank page with some buttons to
add triggers, conditions or actions. As a new user, this immediately imposes
a challenge: what do I need to do?

You guessed it: We have slightly improved that. We have changed the big headers
to be more descriptive and less technical. We have also added some help text to
explain each section, including examples of what they can be used for.

Don’t worry; we’ll hide the explanation once you add elements to the sections
to keep the overview of existing automations as clean as possible.

You might have noticed in the screenshots above the conditions and actions have
a new button next to them: + Add building block.

Selecting these new buttons allows you to add logical elements to your
automation or scripts, like And, Or, If-then, Choose, etc.

These used to be mixed in with the conditions and actions but now have their
own dedicated button. It makes it easier to find them and declutters the
list of conditions and actions.

Notice how this now opens up a dialog? A dialog gives us more space to describe
what each building block does and room for a search box to find the one you need.

The bigger change can be found in the buttons to add a trigger, conditions,
or actions to your automation. This change was not just aimed at new users
but also long-time users.

All these buttons are used to give a dropdown that allows you to select the
type of trigger, condition, or action you want to add. This dropdown has been
replaced by a new dialog similar to the one we just saw for the building blocks.

Like the building block, it describes what each trigger, condition,
or action does. These descriptions are important, as they help you understand
what they do.

If you add an element, we will first show you the most used
triggers/conditions/actions by our community. We now have all others neatly
grouped. For actions, we took it a step further and unified them with
service calls.

If you have been using Home Assistant for a while, you are probably familiar
with the “service call”-action that you can add to your automation. But,
honestly, what is a “service call”? It is a bit of a technical term that is
especially confusing for newer users. You just want to turn on a light, right?

This release unifies those “service calls” with all other actions, meaning
there is no “service call” anymore; that layer has been refactored from the UI.
Instead, you add an action and select the action you want to take, for example,
turn on a light.

This means that if you add an action, you see all actions (including all
service calls), categorized, with description, and searchable! Being able
to search through all available actions is a huge improvement.

By default, just like with the triggers and conditions, we show you the most
used actions first and the actions for the entities you have on your system.
All others are neatly grouped by integration in the Other actions section.

The to-do list integration keeps getting better and better. This release adds
support for descriptions and due dates!

If the integration you are using supports it, you can now add descriptions to
each task on your list. It fully supports the Markdown markup to add links,
bold text, etc. If due dates (or due date + time) are supported, you can
set these.

As shown in the screenshot above, there is a whole new dialog to adjust
your to-do item. But this is not the only change. The list itself has been
improved as well.

It is much cleaner, all big text boxes are gone, and each item is nicely
formatted, including an excerpt of the description and the due date. If the due
date is overdue, it will be highlighted.

A brand new entity type has been added to Home Assistant: Valve!

Integrations can use this entity type to expose valves, such as a valve on
a radiator, pool, sprinkler system, and main house gas or water line.

By popular demand, the thermostat and humidifier cards now support setting
current temperature/humidity as the primary information to show on the
card.

You can enable the show current temperature as primary information option
in the card, which will result in the target temperature being swapped with the
current temperature in the card.

Last year, we saw many new features added to the cards, so let’s start
the new year with some more!

There are many more improvements in this release; here are some of the other
noteworthy changes this release:

We welcome the following new integrations in this release:

The following integrations are now available via the Home Assistant UI:

Home Assistant has a great community of users who are all more than willing
to help each other out. So, join us!