Everything coming to the Home Assistant dashboard in version 0.118
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Just a few weeks, I was telling you what to expect in Home Assistant version 0.117. Now that most of us will be running Home Assistant 0.117 it's already time to have a look at everything new in the upcoming Home Assistant 0.118 dashboard. That's how rapid the pace of Home Assistant development is.
This information once again comes from Zack Barett, who is a YouTuber and developer on the Home Assistant dashboard. I will embed his video, in which he shows off the additions and changes to 0.118, below.
I've been waiting for quite some time for something like the Grid Card, which will be added in Home Assistant 0.118, for some time now. Recently, while I was working on one of my WordPress sites using the plugin GenerateBlocks, which also has a grid block, I thought to myself that it would be much easier to create nice-looking layouts in the Home Assistant dashboard if it had something similar. Little did I know that a Grid Card was already being worked on.
The Grid Card is a combination of the Vertical Stack and Horizontal Stack Cards and will, as time goes on, most likely replace them for many Home Assistant users. You can add any other card into a Grid Card, and it will automatically create a new row and make it the same size as the row above it, every time you fill a row up. If you wanted to create a Vertical Stack, you could simply set the number of columns to one. For the Horizontal Stack, you would need to set the number of columns to be equal to the number of cards.
As a part of Home Assistant 0.118, the Grid Card is a much-needed improvement to the Vertical and Horizontal Stacks. It will allow us to create a much cleaner looking dashboard, and it will make the process of creating those clean looking dashboards much easier.
Keep an eye on your Home Assistant log using the Logbook Card
The Logbook Card is another wholly new addition to Home Assistant 0.118 (though there were custom cards that had a similar function). Essentially, the Logbook Card will display the contents of your Home Assistant log inside a card on the dashboard. What makes the Logbook Card special is that you can decide which entities, no matter how many, you want it to track. It will then only ever show changes to those entities.
Changes to the Calendar Card in Home Assistant 0.118
While it isn't new, the changes to the Calendar Card in Home Assistant 0.118 are worth noting. The list view now shows everything from today to the next seven days. It will act more like an agenda in Home Assistant 0.118. It used to start at the beginning of the week and then just show you that whole week. That meant, that past appointments would also be shown in your list.
The calendar panel, which can be found in the Home Assistant menu, has also received a useful change. Selected and unselected calendars will persist when you refresh the page. This won't work across devices, as the changes you make are saved to the local browser storage.
The Quick Bar gets expanded
Hitting C on your keyboard on any view will pop up a commands list. That commands list displays options to navigate to different parts of the Home Assistant dashboard. This change will surely please those who prefer using a keyboard than a mouse.
Header and footer editor
In Home Assistant 0.118 you will be able to easily add headers and footers to your cards. You will be given the option to choose between a graph, buttons, or an image. For example, you could add an image as the header of an Entities Card and a graph as a footer. All of that can be down without touching a line of code.
Other changes
Home Assistant 0.118 adds the option to display the last time an entity was updated in the dashboard. A new and much nicer date picker has also been added. Make sure you check out this YouTube video for an in-depth look at everything new in the Home Assistant 0.118 dashboard.
About Liam Alexander Colman
Liam Alexander Colmanis an experienced Home Assistant user who has been utilizing the platform for a variety of projects over an extended period. His journey began with a Raspberry Pi, which quickly grew to three Raspberry Pis and eventually a full-fledged server. Liam's current operating system of choice is Unraid, with Home Assistant comfortably running in a Docker container. With a deep understanding of the intricacies of Home Assistant, Liam has an impressive setup, consisting of various Zigbee devices, and seamless integrations with existing products such as his Android TV box. For those interested in learning more about Liam's experience with Home Assistant, he shares his insights on how he first started using the platform and his subsequent journey.
