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.exe from the Releases page.
2. Run it — it's a single self-contained executable, nothing to install.
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.

No installer, no runtime prerequisites, no internet. The binary 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), self-contained single-file
• 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 one .exe

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.