History / Activity page redesign

[marcinbauer-ohf]

👋

💡 The idea

Give History and Activity the same toolbar + left sidebar layout as other tables in HA (devices, entities, etc.), and add the new target picker ui that provides more contextual info for selected targets.

✨ Activity & History changes:

• Sidebar on the left, controls up in the toolbar under the app-bar
• Add the new Add Targets UI that was introduced in Automation Editor
• Add filtering by: Domains, Device Classes, Integrations so that a user can narrow-down an Floor/Area/Device to specific types of data points
• Drop the Refresh button in Activity, doesn't seem needed.

Activity preview:
https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/97dbcb03-93d2-4d5c-af37-c8bf8d63f757

History preview:
https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/dc8a9c46-60d4-4e94-a03e-e8914901d0e2

❓ Open question

History is opt-in: you pick a thing to see its history and then optionally filter it down. Activity shows everything by default, but can also be narrowed down, either by selecting a specific target or via filtering.

Should that split stay as-is, or should the two behave more consistently? Curious what you all think.

[matthiasdebaat]

Good improvement, I like the sidebar approach.

A few thoughts on this:

• Explore if we can merge targets and filters. Picking a target is another filter, so two separate buttons next to each other is hard to parse.
• Right now the target selector gets cut off and you get horizontal scroll. Let it overflow outside the bar instead.
• Since history needs a target to show anything, let's make that obvious. Add a big "select a target" button on the empty screen. On desktop it opens the side panel. On mobile, to save space, it just shows the results directly.

[nielsrowinbik]

Agreed with everything above.

On your question on history versus activity: I think history is "opt-in" for performance reasons. Showing everything by default and filtering down I think would make the page incredibly slow, and also I'm not sure why that would be useful. To me, these pages serve different purposes. Activity shows you things as they're happening, so it makes sense to show everything by default. History, I'd say you're normally not interested in seeing for everything at once, but you'd go in with the aim of seeing a very specific subset of your HA's instance history recording.

By the way, you can go to both the activity and history screens right from any entity's more info screen, so we should not forget that flow when redesigning these pages. I'm not saying I'm seeing blocking issues with the current design, but it's something to keep in mind.

[oerix]

Curious why we’re keeping them separate rather than merging? Activity feels like it could just be History’s default state (no target, recent window, live-updating). Is the performance concern the main blocker, or is there a UX reason too?

[marcinbauer-ohf]

Back with changes:

• Merged Targets and Filters into Sources
• Fixed popover of target picker

CleanShot.2026-07-20.at.15.15.22.2.mp4

Branch link for anyone to test: https://github.com/marcinbauer-ohf/frontend/tree/history-activity-filter-redesign

CC: @bramkragten

[nielsrowinbik]

I love it, but I do wonder again why we need to call it "sources" now and not just leave it as "filters" to match other parts of the product?

[marcinbauer-ohf]

I feel Filters didn't convey enough that you can also select targets there. Filters remind me of just subtracting from something.

[marcinbauer-ohf]

Working with @piitaya on shipping it this release: home-assistant/frontend#53630