Dashboards

A dashboard in HKI 7 is a set of pages — Home, Rooms, and any custom pages you add — filled with items: buttons, stacks, badges and widgets. This page covers how to build one.

Edit mode

Everything on a dashboard is edited in place. There is no separate YAML view and no separate editor screen.

Pull down on the page header to reveal Search, Flows, Edit and Settings. That is how you get into edit mode from anywhere in the app. Gestures

While in edit mode you can:

• Add items to a page.
• Drag to reorder, including into and out of stacks.
• Open any item's settings to change what it shows and how it behaves.
• Delete items.

Automatic vs Manual

A freshly auto-generated dashboard is in Automatic mode and is rebuilt from Home Assistant when things change there. The first edit switches it to Manual, and HKI 7 stops regenerating it. The current mode is the subtitle under Settings › Dashboard.

Family members may not have edit mode

An admin can turn editing off for a person entirely, or limit them to aesthetic changes only. See Family sharing.

Buttons

A button is the basic unit: an entity, an icon, a name, and a state line.

Layout

Four layouts, available on both single buttons and every button in a stack:

Layout	Shape
Standard	A wide card, icon on the left, text beside it
Square	A square card
Tile	A compact tile
Centered	A square card with the icon centred in the space above the text, and the name and state centred beneath it

Centered is what makes a grid of buttons read like a keypad, which is what makes a usable remote control.

Elements

A button's icon, name and state are three independent switches under Elements in its settings. Turn off the name and the state and you have an icon-only button; turn off the icon and keep the text, if that reads better.

The state line

By default the second line shows the entity's state. It can instead show:

• An attribute — pick any attribute of the entity, with an optional unit suffix (°C, %, W, kW).
• A countdown — for entities whose value is a completion timestamp (a washer's "finished at" time), the value is rendered as a live descending timer. Because some integrations keep a stale future timestamp while the appliance is off, you can gate the countdown on a separate operation-state entity so it only runs when the machine actually is.

Actions

Each button has a tap, double-tap and hold action, and each can be set to:

Action	Does
default	Whatever is sensible for the domain
none	Nothing
toggle	Toggles the entity
more_info	Opens the entity's dialog — optionally a different entity's dialog
call_service	Calls a Home Assistant service, with arbitrary service data, targeting the button's own entity, another entity, or nothing
navigate	Jumps to Home, Rooms, Energy, Climate, Security, Battery, or a specific room
url	Opens a URL
custom_popup	Opens one of your custom popups

Buttons can also carry quick-access buttons of their own, shown in the nav bar of the dialog they open — handy for putting a scene or a script next to the thing it acts on.

Locking a button

Any button can be locked so it is not triggered by accident. Choose double-tap or a PIN, and how many seconds it stays unlocked before re-locking (30 by default). Useful for the garage door, the alarm, or anything with consequences.

Domain extras

Some domains get extra settings on the button itself:

• Lights — an optional Google Home-style full-height brightness slider.
• Locks — an optional door/contact sensor whose open state turns the card red, so a locked lock on an open door is visibly wrong.
• Climate — separate temperature and humidity sensor entities, graphed in the dialog's Activity tab, and a choice of slider or dial control.
• Vacuums — how the button renders (static image, live camera, or external image URL) and which map, battery, water and bin entities to read.
• Humidifiers — an optional fan/select entity supplying speed options, plus auxiliary entities (current humidity, tank level, PM2.5, error, bucket full, clean filter, defrost, ioniser, pump, sleep, beep), which can be auto-filled by picking the Home Assistant device.
• Cameras — an entity or a custom URL, with a refresh interval.

Stacks

A stack groups items. There are three kinds:

Button stack

A grid of buttons with a configurable column count and an optional heading. The heading has its own Show name / Show icon / Centre switches, so a heading-less stack does not mean deleting its name.

A stack carries Show icon / Show name / Show state switches for all of its children, so a stack of twenty buttons need not be set twenty times. These mask the children rather than override them: turning one off on the stack hides it on every button; leaving it on lets each button decide for itself. Icon size works the same way — the stack hands one down, and a button's own size still wins.

Stacks can be collapsible, and can start collapsed.

Swiping stack

Holds other widgets and cycles between them. Optional autoplay with a configurable interval and animation duration, and an optional heading.

Empty stack

A plain container with a column count — a way to group arbitrary widgets under one heading.

Stacks can nest: a button stack can live inside a swiping stack.

Badges

Badges are the small pills along the top of a page. A badge targets an entity, or several entities that aggregate into one badge. They have their own icon, colour and tap behaviour, and they live in the badge bar, configured per page.

Custom popups

A popup is a dialog you design once and open from anywhere. Because popups are shared, several buttons, badges or widgets can point at the same one — a "Living room lights" popup reachable from the room card, the hallway button, and a badge, all pointing at a single definition you only maintain once.

Popups are managed under Settings › Dashboard › Popups, and opened with a custom_popup action.

Pages and navigation

Home and Rooms always exist. Beyond those you can add custom pages — as many as you like, each with its own contents.

The navigation bar order is set under Settings › Dashboard. Home and Rooms are always shown; the rest can be reordered and hidden.

Global search

Global search reaches every entity on your Home Assistant, whether or not it is on a page. It is the answer to "I need this one thing occasionally and do not want a button for it".

An admin can turn search off for a family member, or restrict what it exposes with per-person visible/hidden domain and entity lists. See Family sharing.

Visibility rules

Any item — button, stack, badge or widget — can be shown or hidden by rule. This is HKI 7's equivalent of a conditional card, and the rules combine.

Manual

Simply hidden until you unhide it.

Scheduled

A start and end date-time, and whether that window is when the item is shown or hidden. The window can repeat daily, weekly, monthly or yearly — a yearly window ignores the year, so a Christmas button set to show for 24–26 December recurs every year.

Entity state

Gated on whether another entity's state does, or does not, equal a given value.

Person

Gated on which Home Assistant user is signed in on this device — so one shared dashboard can show a different button to each family member.

Multiple conditions can be combined into one expression, each block carrying its own AND/OR connector, so time, entity and person rules can be mixed.

Appearance of an item

Every item shares the same appearance controls:

• Width — full, half or third of the row.
• Corner radius — per item, on top of the global roundness setting.
• Icon — any icon from the bundled Material Design Icons or Simple Icons sets, with an optional per-icon animation override (auto, off, or a forced glow / spin / pulse).
• Background — colour or image.

Global defaults for corners, icons and animation live under Settings › Appearance.