Gestures

HKI 7 keeps its chrome out of the way, which means a few things live behind a gesture rather than behind a visible button. There are not many, and the app teaches them on first launch.

The quick-start guide

The first time your dashboard is ready, a Quick start dialog appears: "Five simple gestures are all you need to get around." Each one is shown with an animation of the movement, and you page through them before tapping Got it, let's explore.

If you skipped past it, everything it covers is below.

The five

Notifications

Swipe right from the upper-left edge.

Opens the notification panel — unread, history, archived, and the Events timeline.

Notifications

Switch homes

Swipe left from the upper-right edge of the header.

Cycles between your Home Assistant instances. Works from any page header, at any time. Only relevant if you have added more than one home.

Multiple homes

Quick actions

Pull down on any page header.

Reveals Search, Flows, Edit and Settings. This is the main one to remember — it is how you reach edit mode and settings from anywhere, and it works on the compact header too.

Several empty screens tell you this directly: an empty Rooms page says to swipe down on the header and enable edit mode; an empty Security or Energy view says to swipe down and open its settings.

Media player

Swipe up on the bottom bar, once the handle appears.

Restores the media player after you have dismissed it. The handle only shows when there is a player to bring back.

Make it yours

In edit mode: drag to reorder, tap to configure.

Add and reorder rooms, floors and widgets by dragging them; tap any item to open its settings.

Dashboards

Also worth knowing

Swipe horizontally to change page

Left and right anywhere on a page moves between your pages — Home, Rooms, and any custom pages, in the navigation bar's order.

The gesture is deliberately forgiving: it locks to an axis once your finger commits, so a vertically scrolling list cannot swallow a horizontal swipe, and it navigates as soon as you have travelled far enough rather than waiting for you to lift. A quick flick works too.

Controls that legitimately need horizontal movement — sliders, nested pagers, horizontal rows — keep the gesture for themselves, so dragging a brightness slider never pages the dashboard.

Opening a view's own page — Solar inside Energy, a group inside Security — suspends paging until you leave it, so a sideways swipe cannot carry you out of what you just opened.

Tabs inside dialogs are changed by tapping them. They do not swipe: a tab strip that scrolls and a page that swipes were competing for the same drag.

Back

Back steps through the pages you actually visited rather than jumping to the first one, and leaves the app once there is nothing behind the page you are on.

Tap the tab you are already on

Returns that view to the top. Views otherwise keep their scroll position indefinitely — there is no timer after which they forget where you were.

Swiping stacks

A swiping stack holds several widgets in one slot; swipe horizontally through them. They can also autoplay on a timer.

Weather season toggle

Where the app shows Astronomical or Meteorological, you can tap or swipe to switch between them.

If a swipe is not registering

• Edge swipes need to start at the edge. The notification and switch-home gestures both begin from the very edge of the screen, in the upper portion of it.
• Android's own back gesture uses the same edges. On devices with gesture navigation, starting too far from the top can trigger the system back instead. Start higher up.
• Horizontal controls win. A swipe that starts on a slider adjusts the slider; it does not page. Start the swipe on empty space or on a plain card.