houseplan-card/docs/UX-MODES.md

UX redesign: three modes (approved 2026-07-21)

Approved design for reorganizing all card interactions into three tab-like modes. Driven by the owner's mandate and confirmed by real user feedback (issue #3: "When moving the map around, I sometimes move the doors/sensors around"). This document is the source of truth for the implemented mode architecture and later iterations.

Principle

A segmented control in the card header with three tabs; the active one is visually highlighted, and edit modes add a colored frame around the stage so the mode is obvious at a glance:

[ 📐 Plan editor ] [ 🔧 Device editor ] [ ✏️ Background editor ] — View has NO tab (since v1.30.2). The Background editor (v1.33.0) manages a purely visual decor layer (lines/rects/ovals/text in space.decor, drawn under the rooms, inert everywhere outside its editor).

• View is the implicit default state: no editor tab is active. Navigation persistence remembers only the last space. Reloading the page or leaving House Plan for another Home Assistant route and returning always opens View for that space; editor mode, selection and open editor dialogs are session state. A purely technical same-route Lovelace remount may preserve an unfinished editor session so an internal DOM rebuild does not destroy work.
• Activating an editor tab highlights it and opens that editor's bottom toolbar (all three editors have one). The toolbar and the active tab each carry an X that closes the editor back to View; re-clicking the active tab does nothing; editors switch directly with a short content fade and an interpolation between their measured toolbar heights, including wrapped multi-row layouts. Toolbar height, usable plan height, zoom/centre, canvas background and editor-specific layers move on one short timeline, so opening an editor never flashes a default scale or a mixed dark/white frame. A rapid second choice retargets from the visible intermediate frame. Reduced-motion preferences apply the same final state immediately. The header X keeps its compact 13 px glyph but owns a hit target of at least 24 × 24 px without changing the tab's layout footprint.
• An editor's primary toolbar contains only persistent tools. Close is pinned in its own end cap. Selection actions, active-tool parameters, operation hints and palettes appear in one translucent context tray over the top of the stage, so they do not shrink/refit the plan or move Close. The tray is also the shared second-level surface for future explicitly approved tool groups; existing tools are not grouped automatically.
• All editor tabs are shown only to admins when admin_only is on.

Input support policy

TOUCH-SUPPORT.md is authoritative for input parity:

• View and kiosk are fully supported touch surfaces. Essential information and safe actions may not depend on hover, a fine pointer or keyboard modifiers.
• Plan, Device and Background editors are desktop-first. Mouse/keyboard in a desktop browser is the reference editing environment.
• Editor operation on touch is best effort. A gesture or precision operation may be awkward, reduced or absent when correct parity is disproportionately expensive.
• Best effort never relaxes data integrity, permissions, destructive confirmations or protection against a pinch/pointer cancellation being saved as an unintended edit.

The presence of editor tabs on a tablet is not a promise of complete editor support. User documentation recommends desktop for creation and maintenance.

View — display and device interaction only

Allowed: pan/zoom (wheel, pinch, buttons, double-click/tap on free background to Fit all), switching spaces, device tap (info / more-info / toggle per settings), long-press → info card, opening tap → door/lock info card (with an explicit Unlock/Lock button when a lock is bound — the only way to operate a lock from the card; plan-icon taps never toggle locks), room-card link icon → HA area, clean room click/tap → room fit, room hover highlight, hover tooltips (name, clean-floor area, temperature, signal).

Room, device, opening and shared-control hover is a mouse-only transient layer: the card enables it per instance after real mouse input on fine/hover hardware, clears it on touch/pen and on mode, space or lifecycle boundaries, and restores it when a real mouse is used again. Keyboard focus, selection and semantic device state do not depend on that gate. A device action that actually dispatches briefly scales its painted shell to 95% and back over 200 ms; informational, editor and no-op paths do not imitate a successful action.

The global settings.show_room_tooltip preference controls only the floating room information window. Missing or invalid values mean enabled; exact false hides the window while room highlight and every device tooltip remain active.

The admin-only General settings → Show Zigbee links on device hover option is off by default. Once an admin explicitly reads cached ZHA data or updates a configured Zigbee2MQTT map, mouse hover temporarily draws only the observed direct links incident to that device. A linked marker in another space is counted beside the source without drawing an inter-space line. Hover never fetches data; touch, pen, keyboard focus, kiosk, editors and the static card do not expose this diagnostic layer.

Removed from this mode (they move, not die):

• icon dragging ("drag anywhere", v1.9 — consciously reversed),
• room-label dragging,
• opening dragging along walls and double-click properties (v1.23.1),
• every edit button in the header (+device, 👁 show-all, ↺ reset, ⬡ rules, ⚙ general, per-space gear, markup toggle).

Header in View: space tabs, device count, zoom cluster. Nothing else.

Plan — geometry and appearance of the space

• Toolbar tools: Walls (one continuous chain with its session wall-thickness field, default 15 cm — docs/WALL-THICKNESS.md §6), Delete room, Merge, Split, Resize, Column, Opening (place / drag along walls / properties), Thickness (docs/WALL-THICKNESS.md — click a wall, set cm/inches from HA's unit system; 0..100, while empty/invalid values are rejected), Room labels (drag positions — labels are part of the plan).

• Space gear dialog (title, plan image / hand-drawn, scale, Display section, show_lqi), add space, floors import, delete space. Saving a new space opens this editor with the draw tool armed (an empty floor has nothing useful in View).

• ⚙ General settings (fill palette) lives here — it is about the plan's appearance.

• Independent partitions and columns are masonry for hit testing as well as area/light: room hover stops at their physical bodies just as it stops at a thick room wall. This does not split the room or change its HA area.

• Changing Plan tool, editor or floor finishes an open Walls chain as ordinary partitions. Closing one or more planar faces opens the room queue; its decisions are buffered and applied as one Undo/Redo transaction. Re-selecting Walls, Reset, pan, pinch and pointer cancellation are not finish actions.

• Opening places every existing opening type on a room wall or a finished independent Walls segment. A hosted opening moves with that segment; deleting the segment requires an explicit cascade confirmation. Its physical gap does not break the structural wall axis used to recognize closed rooms (#185).

• Zero thickness is part of the ordinary wall system. Walls may draw it and Thickness may apply it to a contour, draft or independent segment. Space settings choose one common dashed/solid appearance: dashed transmits Glow and sun; solid is a zero-area light barrier. A zero wall cannot host an opening.

What a space may choose not to draw (2026-08-05)

Four switches in the space's Display section decide how much of the plan is inked. All of them are display only — nothing is deleted, nothing changes meaning, and each layer stays visible in the editor that owns it, because a layer you cannot see is a layer you cannot edit.

Setting	Off (default)	On	Always drawn in
show_borders — «Всегда отображать границы комнат»	in View, room borders and zero-thickness wall lines are hidden	both are drawn	room borders: Plan; zero-thickness walls: all editors
show_names — «Показывать названия»	no room name/card is drawn in View, kiosk or the static card	the HTML room card is drawn	Plan, for positioning only
hide_decor — «Скрыть декоративный слой»	decor is drawn	lines, shapes, labels and furniture are hidden	the Background editor
hide_openings — «Скрыть проёмы»	doors, windows and gates are drawn	their symbols are hidden	the Plan editor

• Zero-thickness walls follow show_borders in View. Every editor deliberately shows their axes regardless of the switch: hiding geometry while editing a plan, device placement or its underlay makes those modes visually ambiguous. Their solid/dashed choice still affects light while the line itself is hidden.
• show_names: false means no permanent fallback label. View, kiosk, hidden isometric and houseplan-space-card all omit the room name. Plan may show the same HTML card temporarily so its saved position remains editable; returning to View hides it again. Re-enabling names restores the saved layout rather than creating a new one.
• Their geometry and their presentation are separate. Every zero wall ends on its saved axis node. In View a neighbouring thick body may paint over the line end so it visually stops at the masonry face; editors paint the full axis over the body for unambiguous editing.
• hide_openings hides the symbol, not the opening. Light still spills through it, the sun still enters at a window, a contact sensor still opens it, and the resize tool still anchors to it. Anything else would be a second meaning for one setting.
• Both hide switches store nothing when off (the key is omitted, as bg_color is), so a plan written before this reads back byte-for-byte. Backend: show_names, hide_decor and hide_openings are strictly bool and optional.

Devices — placement and marker configuration

• Icon dragging (ONLY here). Click on a device opens the edit dialog directly (binding, name, icon, size/angle, display as icon / icon + activity / value, activity color and size, tap override, model/link/description/PDFs, room).
• The toolbar always keeps position-only Undo/Redo beside Close. One released drag is one command; cancellation, no movement and a failed write create no command. The independent 50-step session stack also uses Ctrl/Cmd+Z, Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+Z and Ctrl+Y and never absorbs marker configuration, lifecycle or Plan/Background edits.
• • add device/entity/virtual, the bottom-left "Hide" / "Show" action in an existing device dialog (the one hiding mechanism, docs/FILTERING.md), 👁 "Show hidden" (local editor tool; replaced the shared show-all toggle), ⬡ icon rules.

Background — the decor underlay

• Toolbar tools: Select / optional Plan backdrop / Line / Rectangle / Oval / Text / Furniture / Erase, plus contour colour+opacity, physical width, optional fill colour+opacity and shared Undo/Redo. Shapes are drag-drawn with grid/decor/room snap and a live preview.
• In Select, double click always means “edit this object”. Text opens its text/HA-variable form; a line, rectangle, oval or furniture symbol opens the complete numeric/style form, with Fill where the shape supports it. Every selected kind has the common move/resize/rotate controller; lines use end handles. The image is transformed only in its own tool and fades to 0.5 below the other Background tools.
• Live size badge (owner 2026-08-04): while a LINE is being dragged out, the same .measurelabel the Plan editor puts on a wall shows «length · angle» — segmentCm over the space's cell_cm, metres or feet per the HA unit system, green on a 45° multiple. It rides the MIDDLE of the segment (a wall badge follows the cursor because the cursor is the wall's free end; a decor line is pulled out by both ends at once), updates on every move and disappears the moment the shape is committed. Rectangles show size and area; circles show R, and non-circular ovals Rx × Ry; a draft with no size shows nothing.

Plan — independent physical objects

• Walls draws one continuous crash-safe chain. Newly closed planar faces may become rooms; changing tool/editor/floor finishes an open chain as independent wall objects. A click on another saved draft endpoint may join it, while branching from the middle of a saved draft is unsupported.
• Finished independent walls remain selectable physical objects. Column places a square column whose side is the current Thickness value. Neither an independent wall nor a column creates a room or HA area by itself. A closed independent-wall ring subtracts only its wall body from room floor.
• Door, window, gate and passage may be hosted by one finished independent wall segment. Drafts and columns are never opening targets. Missing hosts fail dark and expose a rebind action only in Plan.
• Select is the only mode in which these objects intercept input. It offers rigid grid-bound drag, double-click/tap properties, Delete, and a rotate handle for square columns (5° steps; Shift is free). Draft Delete removes the whole outline; its properties dialog separately offers segment deletion.
• Physical objects are inert in View/kiosk. show_borders: false hides their paint in View without changing area or light physics.

Deprecations decided

1. "Drag anywhere" (v1.9) — reversed by this design.
2. Opening drag / dbl-click properties in view (v1.23.1) — moved into Plan.
3. The markup toggle button — replaced by the Plan tab.
4. Legacy localStorage mode (card without the integration) — candidate for removal in the next major; adds branching for a half-working scenario.

Approved follow-up features (from issue #3, by priority)

1. State-reflecting icons (open/closed door variants etc., like core HA).
2. display: value — show the measurement instead of an icon.
3. Light color in the activity effect (RGB lights). (Shipped in v1.27.0; superseded in v1.52.0: the colour lives in the glow spot and the activity fallback only, the icon tint was removed by the owner's rule.)
4. Alarm visual (leak/smoke/doorbell): red pulse overlay.
5. Rooms as sub-areas without an HA area + manual device placement by room id.
6. Backlog (not planned): music notes for players, directional TV effects.

Implementation iterations

• It.1 — mode shell: the segmented control, mode state, View-mode gating of all edit interactions/buttons (biggest UX win, smallest surface).
• It.2 — Plan tab: move markup tools + space dialogs + labels drag + openings editing under Plan; colored frame indicator.
• It.3 — Devices tab: drag + direct-edit click + filtering tools under Devices.
• It.4+: follow-up features 1–5 above, each its own release.

Kiosk mode (v1.41.0)

kiosk: true on the card is the fourth interaction surface: the full View experience with the header removed and editors hard-blocked (even for admins). Swipe switches spaces at 1:1 zoom only (zoomed gestures pan; double tap resets zoom); cycle: N auto-advances spaces with a 60 s pause after any touch; a 3 s long-press on empty plan opens the per-screen size popover (localStorage). Nav persistence never restores an editor here.