How To Control Your Mac With Cheap Little Gamepads

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can use a game controller to control your Mac. 

So if you like controlling your Mac with the F keys or the modifier keys and letters and creating all sorts of custom commands you may like, also, using an external device like a game controller to do the same thing. For awhile now the Mac has supported Xbox game controllers. Anyones that just work with Bluetooth. So you can use them certainly to play games. If a game supports a game controller then there is really nothing to do. You can just connect the game controller and then start playing the game. But you can also map the buttons on a game controller to do various other things on your Mac. These can be a lot less expensive than buying some sort of specialty keyboard or pad with different controls on it. This little controller here costs about $15 on sale. There are a bunch of little ones like this on online stores and for only about $40 you can get full-size Xbox game controllers and use those to play games and also for special functions like this. 

So I didn't buy anything special here. I just looked online for a deal on a little mini Xbox controller. This one actually can be Xbox switch or Playstation. I've got the switch set to Xbox here. It's Bluetooth but it also can be connected by USB. Now the first step in connecting one of these to your Mac is, of course, to use the Bluetooth control. So go into System Settings and then go to Bluetooth. Then you're going to want to read the instructions for your device as to how to pair. There's a little pairing button at the bottom of this. So, I am going to click and hold that and look for it to appear here. Here it goes. I'm going to connect to it and I should see it jump here to the top. When I first did this it took a little while to connect but you can see now, in this case, it connected pretty quickly. You can see it automatically switched me to the Game Focus Mode. Something your Mac does when it notices a Game Controller is connected. So what you want to do if you don't want that is you want to go to System Settings, Focus. Go to Gaming here and you want to Disable where it says Wireless Controller. Go into here and don't have it turn on automatically. So now it won't change Focus Modes on you just because you've connected this. 

Now to get this working you're going to need a third party app. There's a variety of different things you can use. I'm going to start out with one I've already had, and I know a lot of people have. It's one of the few third party apps I heartedly recommend and it is Keyboard Maestro. This allows you to do all sorts of special things to control your Mac and you can use it to grab some of the buttons here and actually perform things. I'm going to create a new group here and I'm going to call this group Gamepad Controls just so I can have them all in one place and I can disable the whole group at once if I want. Now I'm going to add one here. So I'm going to add something really simple. I just want to use one of these buttons here, let's say the A button, to just launch an app. So I'm going to call this Launch Calculator. Like that. I'm going to  set the Action here and I'm going to Search for App here and I can see Activate a Specific Application. Perfect. What Application do I want to activate? Well I can select from here. I'm going to select Other. It's going to take me to my Applications Folder and I'll find Calculator. Now this will run Calculator. If I run this you can see Calculator launches. Great. Now let's set a trigger. So you click here and you can set a Hot Key, that's for your keyboard. What you want to do is look down here for USB Device Key Trigger. Select that. Now it is waiting for you to give it the Command. So I'm going to press the A key here. You can see right there Xbox Wireless Controller Button 5 is pressed. So it will run this when the button is pressed. I can now Quit the Editor. I've still got Keyboard Maestro running up here and now whenever I want to launch Calculator I can just press A and Calculator launches. 

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Now let's do some more and see what other buttons work on here with Keyboard Maestro. So I'm going to add one here for Volume Up. I can go to New Action here. I can Search for Volume and there's a whole bunch of different ones here. I'm going to Increase the System Volume, like that. This is the equivalent to pressing the volume key on your Keyboard. I want to set a new trigger here so I'm going to go down to the USB Device Key Trigger. Now I'm going to try the Right Arrow here on the little keypad. But guess what? It doesn't do anything. It doesn't work. It turns out these don't really send key presses. It's a different kind of control here as opposed to the buttons that do like A, X, Y, and B. So I want to experiment with something else. I've got buttons here where they're at the top and the little ones don't actually trigger anything but the larger ones do. If I press the larger one you can see it is button 8. So now when I use button 8 the volume goes up. Let's go ahead and add another one here for volume down. I'll add the action. I will Decrease The System Volume, like that. I will use the trigger for the other side here. Now I can do Up and Down Volume. Pretty handy. 

So not everything that you want to do is going to be possible in Keyboard Maestro or it maybe possible just a lot harder to make than making it in shortcuts. But unfortunately Shortcuts doesn't have any way for you to trigger it with this.You're going to have to use Keyboard Maestro as the go-between. So let's say I want to use a simple shortcut like center the front window. All it does is figure out what window is at the front and then moves it to the center. I just want to have a button that does that really easily, maybe so I can do it during a presentation. So this is called Center Front Window. I'm going to go to Keyboard Maestro again and I'm going to add something new here, I'll call it the same thing. Like that. I'm going to have it triggered using the, let's say, B button, so it comes up as button 2. The Action I'm going to do here is To Execute Shortcut and I can type the exact name since I know it, but you can also search for it here in the list. So let me open up, say, a Finder window here and have it be off-center and then I will press B and you can see it works. Keyboard Maestro quickly executes that shortcut. So now I have a way to bring the current window to the center. 

That's just an example. You can have any shortcut run. For instance I've got a Prepare for Presentation shortcut that sets a focus mode, changes my desktop wallpaper, does a whole bunch of different things. I can hook that up to the B key to make it really easy to get started with a presentation.

Now speaking of presentations, it would be useful to use this during a presentation. You can roam the stage or meeting room and use this little controller in your hand to actually advance slides and do different things. We've already set it up to change the volume, for instance. You can easily use Keyboard Maestro to map one of the A, B, X or Y buttons to the right arrow or left arrow or the menu commands for advancing or going back one slide in Keynote. But now it would be nice to actually use that D-pad here that we can't use with Keyboard Maestro and actually map that to go into the next slide to the previous slide. All we need to do is map this right arrow here to the right arrow on the keyboard and it should work. Unfortunately Keyboard Maestro can't do that since it can't respond to this. Even something like carabiner elements can't do it as it's only for working with keyboards not these little D-pads. So we need another App for that. 

Fortunately, the Mac App Store is filled with apps that handle game controllers like this and allow you to do different things. I picked one kind of at random but also because it was update more recently than the others. This one called Gamepad Mapper. There is a whole bunch of in app purchases that you're going to be hit for. But everything I'm going to show here can be done without buying any of those. 

So I'm going to open up that app here and you can see it recognizes that this controller is attached. Then it has got a configuration list. The default set here. I'll turn it On so I don't forget to turn it on later. Then I'm going to go to Configuration. Now I can map different things to a variety of different commands. So I'm going to use the right side of the D-pad there. It is going to map to button 14 for this. What am I going to have it do? I'm going to have it do Keyboard and then I'm going to map that and press on the keyboard the right arrow. I'm going to also do the left arrow here and I'm going to map that to the keyboard, left arrow. So now that I save and I make sure I have this turned On I can go to my Presentation here and play the slideshow. Now, of course, I can use the keyboard right arrow to go forward and the left arrow to go back. But since I mapped these I can also use these to do it. I can go through my presentation and go back pretty easily. Again if you don't want to go and get an app like that and you're already using Keyboard Maestro you can use the top two buttons here. Instead of volume you can set them to be right and left. Or you can use one of the four main buttons there to do it. 

But if you don't have Keyboard Maestro and just get an app like this there's a lot of other stuff you can do. For instance, I can do the down arrow, which is button 12, and I will have that set to mouse scroll. I will do Up for natural scrolling and do the maximum amount. I'll do the Up Arrow and I will do mouse scroll to down the maximum amount and Save. So now here I am at a webpage and I can actually scroll on the webpage by holding down these buttons here. 

Now, of course, I'm just scratching the surface on what you can do with these since you can map some of these buttons to any key that you want or have them do actions through Keyboard Maestro or through Keyboard Maestro do any shortcut that you want and have these mapped to anything that you want as well, then you can just set them up for anything. So, for instance, if you edit video you can use one of these or perhaps a bigger controller to actually have some of the shortcuts that you use while editing video. Same for if you do graphics or if you do spreadsheets. You can map all sorts of functions and keyboard shortcuts and things to a cheap little controller like this instead of just adding more and more keyboard shortcut combinations. It works with other things too. In the past I showed how to use one of these. These don't really cost that much more. This is a little Bluetooth keypad. There's a bunch of them you can buy and hook them up. They are meant for just typing numbers. But in Keyboard Maestro these keys will actually be different triggers than the keys on your keyboard. So you can map these to all sorts of different functions as well. 

I also want to point out that when I connected this with a USB cable to my Mac it still worked. But it was seen as a different device. A USB device as opposed to a Bluetooth device, I suppose. So all the mappings I did, didn't work. I had to map new things to it, which actually could be interesting. You could switch modes by whether you have it connected to by Bluetooth or connected by USB cable. 

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.