Install a Home Assistant Taskbar Menu (Windows)

In this guide, I’m going to show you how to install the Home Assistant Taskbar Menu client for Windows 10, 11, or Server 2019. This program allows you to control entities, display your entire Lovelace dashboard, run automations, call scripts, and even shows Home Assistant Persistent notifications directly on your desktop.

While I typically run everything from my phone or the Home Assistant webui, there are definitely some use cases for installing this taskbar. For example, I can bind keyboard shortcuts on my Corsair K57 RGB Wireless keyboard to toggle a light, arm my Alarmo alarm system, open the garage door, and much more.

To do this, we are going to be installing the Home Assistant Taskbar Menu.

Let’s get started!

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Download & Run Installer

Download the latest version of the installer from here.

Then, run the installer. On the blue “Windows Protected your PC” window, click More Info and Run Anyway.

Install it with all defaults.

After the installation completes, an Authenticate window will pop up asking you to provide a URL and Long Lived Access Token.

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Generate Access Token

In your Home Assistant webui, click on your profile picture.

Scroll to the bottom and locate the Long-Lived Access Tokens section. Create Create Token.

Give your token a name like HATM (abbreviation for Home Assistant Taskbar Menu). Then click OK.

A new window will pop up with your token. Copy it or keep the window open for now; it won’t be shown again.

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Enter URL and Access Token into “Authenticate” Box

Next, just enter your Home Assistant IP or hostname into the URL field and paste in your token.

Then, click the Check button.

The Save button won’t be visible if the token was entered incorrectly, so if the save button turns blue – you can now save it.

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Initial Setup

In your Taskbar, left-click the notification tray icon and enter your Home Assistant credentials.

This will now show you a minimized view of your Home Assistant Lovelace dashboard!

The window is resizable, so feel free to make it as small or as large as you want.

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Configuring your Menu

Right-click your taskbar icon. By default, it will show the first 100 supported entities from the following domains:

• automation
• climate
• cover
• fan
• input_boolean
• input_number
• input_select
• light
• lock
• media_player
• scene
• script
• switch
• vacuum

To configure what shows up and remove all the suggested entities/scripts, scroll to the very bottom. A menu will now be displayed. Click the gear icon to edit the application settings:

A View Configuration screen will appear.

To add an entity directly to the root menu, click Add Entity.

If you want to group things together (For example, by room or by device type – such as Lights), then click Add Node. This is basically a parent folder that dropdowns where you can add entities inside.

I’m going to add a Node first to keep my menu organized.

After adding a few nodes, select the one you want to add entities to.

Right-click it > Add Entity.

By default, it will use the Home Assistant “friendly” name, but you can optionally change that.

If you expand the node, you’ll now see the entities you’ve added:

Note: If you click the blue Add Entity box, it will add the entity to the “Root” menu, not inside the node.

Now, if you right-click the Home Assistant Menu Tray icon again, all of those 100 defaults will be removed and instead it’ll only show the nodes and entities you’ve configured:

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Enabling Persistent Notifications

Persistent notifications are the notifications you see in the “Notifications” sidebar of Home Assistant:

If you want to start seeing those as Windows notifications, click the gear and set the Mirror Notifications to True:

To test the persistent notification, go to Developer Tools > Services. Type Persistent Notification: Create and give it a test message and title. Then Call Service.

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Creating Shortcuts

If you’d like to create desktop shortcuts to run service calls (for example, toggling a light), you can do that too. You can then bind these shortcuts to keyboard hotkeys.

The default install path for Home Assistant Taskbar Menu is:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Home Assistant Taskbar Menu

Create Your First Shortcut

Right-click your desktop > New > Shortcut.

Browse to:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Home Assistant Taskbar Menu\Home Assistant Taskbar Menu.exe

Click Next and give your shortcut a name. Then click Finish.

Right-click the new shortcut > Properties. Under the Target: field, leave the existing target path, add a space, and paste this in:

call_service switch.toggle {\"entity_id\": \"switch.smart_plug\"}

Replace switch.smart_plug with your Entity ID, of course. (found in Home Assistant under Configuration > Entities)

The full path for the Target: field should look like this:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Home Assistant Taskbar Menu\Home Assistant Taskbar Menu.exe" call_service switch.toggle {\"entity_id\": \"switch.smart_plug\"}

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Common Service Calls for Shortcuts

Here’s some commonly used service calls you could use:

• switch.toggle
  • switch.turn_on
  • switch.turn_off
• light.toggle
  • light.turn_on
  • light.turn_off
• cover.toggle (garage doors)
  • cover.open_cover
  • cover.close_cover

Basically, any service calls you would use in an Automation can be added to a Shortcut.

An easy way to find all available service calls is by going into Developer Tools > Services > and scrolling through the entire list of available service calls.

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Creating Hotkeys to Run Shortcuts

In the desktop shortcut properties, you can bind these shortcuts to any keyboard key. If you use regular keys, like F1-F12, just click into the shortcut key: field, press F1, and then save it.

If your keyboard has additional keys that can be mapped (for example, my Corsair K57 keyboard has G1-G6), then you can also map those.

First, right-click the newly created shortcut. Under shortcut key, give it an obscure combination like Ctrl+Alt+F1 so you don’t accidentally run the shortcut during normal use.

Then, open your keyboard software (mine is iCue). Create a new key assignment that maps keystroke Ctrl+Alt+F1 to your G1 key.

Now, whenever you press G1, it’ll run the shortcut -(i.e. – toggling the lamp)!

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Installing HATM On Other Computers

If you would also like to install this taskbar menu on other computers (without needing to manually recreate your menu or reauthenticate), that’s pretty easy.

Navigate here on the source computer where it’s already installed. (Just paste the path below into File Explorer.)

%APPDATA%\Home Assistant Taskbar Menu\Home Assistant Taskbar Menu

Then, install the software on the 2nd device.

Copy the config_credentials.dat and config_view.dat files from the source computer to the same location on the 2nd computer, and everything will look exactly the same!

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Wrapping Up

Hopefully you guys have as much with customizing your Home Assistant Taskbar Menu as much as I have!

For an IT Manager like myself, who works at his computer all day, this has been an extremely handy tool to make my Home Assistant experience just a little bit better.