I never thought it would happen so quickly, but it looks like the compact header is making an official comeback in Home Assistant 0.117, along with several enhancements to the Dashboard. Developer Zack Barett has previewed the changes in the beta version of Home Assistant, which include the compact header, a sleek quick bar, updates to the weather card, and improved entity picker search functionality. Although there's no guarantee that all of these changes will be included in the final release, it seems likely that many of them will.
The new compact header
The biggest and most sought after change coming to a Home Assistant near you is of course the compact header. The official compact header is developed by the same person who brought us the popular custom component. That person goes by the name of maykar and can be sponsored on GitHub (they definitely deserve it!).
As already alluded to in an earlier article, the official compact header won’t have all the bells and whistles the custom component had. It will do one thing only, but it will do that thing well and in all upcoming releases of Home Assistant: shrink the massive forehead the Home Assistant dashboard displays per default.
The compact header is great news for everyone who primarily uses mobile devices to display their Home Assistant dashboard. Being able to shrink the header down to a more manageable size also makes it much more suitable for wall-mounted tablets.
The new quick bar
Another interesting and potentially very useful addition to the Home Assistant dashboard is what is being called the quick bar. On any view in your Home Assistant dashboard, you can click CTRL + P to bring up a list box of all available entities. Using the quick bar, you can search for entities and run commands.
Searching for entities as simple as hitting CTRL + P and then typing out the name of your entity. But if hit CTRL + P a second time a list of available commands will appear which you can execute right there from the Home Assistant dashboard.
Changes to the weather card
The text for the secondary information on the weather card has now been replaced by an icon, which will make sure that it won’t overlap any other information. You will also be able to change the information displayed in that field. If you’re not interested in the humidity, you can change it to the air pressure, ozone levels, or any of the available options.
Improvements to the entity picker search
This one is a small but very useful improvement. You used to be only able to search for the entity ID when editing your Lovelace cards. For example, if you had an automation with the title Lock doors at night and the ID automation.ticker that entity wouldn’t show up when searching for night. In version 0.117 that will change, and you will no longer have to remember the exact ID when searching for entities to place on your Home Assistant dashboard.
Everything else
There are a handful of other improvements, which are all detailed in Zach Barett’s video. If you’re interested in knowing what is coming up, I suggest you take the time to watch his content. For this article, I’ve only cherry-picked the most interesting changes. Development on Home Assistant is continuing at a very rapid pace and depending on when you’re reading this, certain things might already be out of date.
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