If you’ve ever tried Home Assistant then you will likely be aware of the ups – and downs – of automating your entire smart home environment. Whether you operate your lights, sensors or thermostats, each adjustment you make in your configuration can have a tremendous impact. But as before, the one drawback was that once you made a change, there was no easy way to undo or redo shortcut that change.
That’s finally changing. Home Assistant has implemented Undo and Redo shortcut, much awaited functionality of being able to easily, safely and in a much more intuitive way maintain your smart home settings. In this edition of our series, we deep dive into what this update brings, why it is important and how this will improve your experience as a user of Home Assistant.
What Is Home Assistant? A Quick Refresher
Home Assistant is one of the most popular open source home automation which allows you to automate your devices, build routines and integrate devices from tons of different brands without giving away or losing your privacy, or even your control.
Unlike cloud-based house working systems, such as Google House or Alexa, Home Assistant operates locally on your network, so your information is always private. It’s loved by users for its customization, voltage tolerance to be able to connect to hundreds of integrations and advanced automation control.
However, this flexibility also introduced the drawback that mismatches in configuration files and automations would often times break entire systems – and the mismatches would usually have to be corrected either by manual rollback or restore of the backups. And that’s where the new Undo/Redo feature comes in.
The Great Update: Undo and Redo Functionality
The new release of Home Assistant finally has Undo / Redo support in some important areas of the system. That means that users can now experiment and make changes, or just try something without worrying about losing work.
Imagine if you need to change the trigger of an automation, delete an entity accidentally, change the layout on a dashboard, and then it’s not what you thought. So, instead of having to build or restore everything from a snapshot, and then rebuilding it more and more times, you can now perform a change and simply click “Undo” and it will instantly undo it.
This makes Home Assistant not just more powerful, but also more user-friendly, especially if you are new to making use of Home Assistant and may still be getting accustomed to relationships between automations and entities.
How Undo and Redo function in Home Assistant?
You have Undo/Redo directly implemented in the Home Assistant user interface (UI) and it is the same for different editable areas. It is a small but powerful enhancement that contributes to enhancing the workflow. Here’s one example of how that plays out in the real world:
- When you make a configuration change to your system (like editing an automation for example, or changing an entity’s name) Home Assistant now knows about those changes (and has written visual data to the DB mentioned earlier).
- If you feel like you did something wrong you can just tap on the Undo button to undo them.
- Likewise, you can press the Redo button when you make another mistake to undo another of the actions that you just undid.
It is instant in its use and does not require any further setup or technical knowledge. This makes Home assistant much more like the modern desktop applications like text editors or designing applications that have had this feature for years.
Why This is Such an Important Feature?
For Home Assistant users it’s not just the convenience that surrounds this update – it’s the confidence. In previous versions when you needed to change a YAML setting or a UI setting, this had to be done carefully. If you got something wrong you would have broken automations or lost a setup which would have taken hours to build. Undo/Redo changes that. Now you can:
- Be less restrictive with automations
- Try out designs and integrations without worrying about making permanent errors
- Get to know the platform much faster without worrying about configuration breakages.
- Essentially it security-hardens Home Assistant – where mistakes can be easily fixed, and one can be as creative as one likes, without consequence.
Where You Can Use Undo/Redo?
Right now, the platform is beginning to support Undo/Redo behavior, first in the Automation Editor, in the Script Editor, and in Dashboards. That implies that you can now conveniently edit the following:
- Automations (triggers, conditions and actions)
- Device and routines scripts
- User Interface
- Dashboard
Undo/Redo with working support is a feature that should be further polished in upcoming versions by the home assistant team and hopefully broaden its scope.
What Does This Mean to the Smart House Lovers?
Undo/Redo change might not be major from the developer perspective, but the users are in rapture as it was a huge usability benefit.Here’s why it’s a big deal:
- Reduced Risk: You are no longer afraid of breaking your configuration in the process of experimentation.
- Increased Creative Capacity: It is easier to play with new Automation Flows and UI design.
- Time-Saving: Reversals are performed in seconds – No more, tedious manual recovery;
- Easy Onboarding: New users will not have to waste time roaming and learning as this will save the frustration factor.
This is part of Home Assistant’s broader goal to make managing a smart home supposedly easier, even for people with potentially little technical competence.
Conclusion
The introduction of Undo and Redo in Home Assistant is a tremendous leap in usability and confidence for the millions of people who use the platform. It makes you free to explore, experiment and customize your smart home without a second thought – because there isn’t a wrong move here.
This update not only makes Home Assistant powerful and private – it also makes it less painful and smarter, more forgiving, and everything modern smart houses are supposed to be.
Also Read: How to Account & Access your Clipboard on Android?