Controller as Mouse

Use any controller as a mouse on Windows — free and fully offline.

Plug in an Xbox, DualShock 4, or DualSense pad and it is your mouse — everywhere on the desktop. Move the cursor, click, scroll, and drag from the couch with a game controller. Controller as Mouse turns a gamepad into a mouse on Windows 10 and 11: no account, no ads, no watermark, nothing to configure in a text file.

A friendly, GUI-first, free open-source alternative to Gopher360 and other controller-to-mouse tools — sliders and profiles instead of hand-edited .ini files. If you searched for how to use a controller as a mouse, control the mouse with a controller, or controller to mouse software, this is it.

Not affiliated with or endorsed by Gopher360 or Tylemagne. Independent, clean-room implementation released under the MIT license.

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Who it's for

Controller as Mouse is built for the living room, HTPC / media center, presentations, and accessibility — driving Windows one-handed, or with limited fine-motor control, using a comfortable game pad instead of a mouse. It is a general desktop tool, not a gaming aim tool.

Features

Core

• Left stick → smooth cursor with an acceleration curve (fine near center, fast at the edge — not linear)
• Right stick → scroll (vertical and horizontal)
• A / RT → left click · X → right click · R3 (right-stick press) → middle click
• D-pad → arrow keys · B → Esc
• LT → precision: the harder you pull, the finer the cursor moves
• Start + Back → toggle the whole mapping on/off
• Works across the entire desktop — browsers, media players, any window

What makes it nicer than the classics

• Sensitivity by sliders in the UI — Cursor speed, Scroll speed, Deadzone, Acceleration, scroll inversion — never a text file
• Profiles saved as JSON in %LOCALAPPDATA%\ControllerAsMouse\, with presets Couch / Media, Precision, Left-handed, plus New / Rename / Duplicate / Delete
• Start with Windows (per-user, no admin), launches minimized to the tray
• Tray icon with a right-click menu (Enable/Disable, pick a profile, Settings, Quit)
• Hot-plug: connect or unplug a pad and it's picked up instantly, no restart
• Global toggle from the pad (Start + Back) and the keyboard (Ctrl + Alt + M)
• Left-handed mode swaps the sticks for one-handed use
• Xbox / DualShock 4 / DualSense supported out of the box via SDL2 — no vendor drivers

Default mapping

Control	Action
Left stick	Move cursor (acceleration curve)
Right stick	Scroll (vertical + horizontal)
A	Left click (hold to drag)
RT	Left click
X	Right click
R3 (right-stick click)	Middle click
LT (analog)	Precision — slows the cursor proportionally
D-pad	Arrow keys
B	Esc
Start + Back	Toggle mapping on/off

Install & use

1. Download ControllerAsMouse.zip from the Releases page.
2. Extract the archive and run ControllerAsMouse.msi — the installer is small and finishes in a couple of seconds.
3. Plug in a controller. The status line shows e.g. Controller connected: DualSense. Move the left stick — that's your cursor.
4. Optionally tick Start with Windows and Minimize to tray.

A small .msi installer, no runtime prerequisites, no internet. The .msi is unsigned, so on first launch Windows SmartScreen may warn — click More info → Run anyway.

Supported controllers

Works with Xbox controllers (use your Xbox controller as a mouse), PlayStation DualShock 4 and DualSense (PS4 / PS5 controller as a mouse), and most XInput / DirectInput gamepads, via SDL2's read-only game-controller API — no vendor drivers needed.

How it works

Controller as Mouse moves the mouse — it does not create a virtual controller and installs no kernel driver. Input is synthesized with the standard Win32 SendInput API; controllers are read with SDL2's read-only SDL_GameController API. That keeps it a plain, transparent desktop utility.

How it's built

• C# / .NET 8 WinForms (net8.0-windows, win-x64)
• SDL2 for cross-vendor controller input (SDL_GameController) via a small hand-written P/Invoke binding
• Win32 SendInput (P/Invoke to user32) for mouse/keyboard synthesis
• The SDL2 native DLL is embedded and extracted to %LOCALAPPDATA% on first run, so the shipped product is a .msi installer

License

MIT — see LICENSE. Bundled third-party components and their licenses are listed in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.txt (SDL2 is zlib-licensed).

Not affiliated with or endorsed by Gopher360 or Tylemagne. All trademarks belong to their respective owners.