This Handy New App Lets You Remotely Control Your Mac with Your PS4 or Xbox Controller

Xbox One Controller on Mac Credit: Diego Marín / Unsplash
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Last year Apple famously added support for gaming on your iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV with the most popular Microsoft Xbox and Sony PlayStation controllers, but now an enterprising developer is taking this kind of integration to the next level, allowing you to use your game controller as a remote control for your Mac as well.

Controlly is a new app that allows you to use just about any PlayStation or Xbox controller as a sophisticated remote control for your Mac. It was developed by Hugo Lispector, known for the popular El Trackpad that lets users turn their iPhone or iPad into a full-featured Mac trackpad, complete with gesture support.

However, while El Trackpad was limited to working over a wired USB connection, Controlly works entirely with wireless game controllers, and moreover, it’s highly customizable, so you can map your game control to whatever you might want to do on your Mac, whether that’s playing games, controlling media apps, or just surfing the web.

Controlly allows for full mapping of every button, thumbstick, and d-pad direction on your controller to a different function on your Mac, from simply moving the mouse pointer to adjusting volume and media playback controls and triggering features like Mission Control and Launchpad. You can even create custom shortcuts to map to any key or key sequence.

How to Use It

The process of setting up Controlly is pretty straightforward, and you should be able to get it up and running in only a few minutes as long as you have a compatible controller. It officially supports both PS4 DualShock and Xbox One controllers, although many MFi controllers should also work just fine.

Here’s how to get started:

  1. Download Controlly from the Mac App Store here.
  2. Open System Preferences on your Mac.
  3. Select Bluetooth in System Preferences.
  4. Put your game controller into pairing mode. This varies between different controllers, but Apple has some helpful tips.
  5. Open Controlly.
  6. Follow the instructions to authorize Controlly in your Accessibility settings.
  7. It should detect your paired controller and prompt you to sign up for a seven-day trial. Alternatively, you can just buy the app right away for a one-time payment of $3.99.
  8. Customize the controls to your liking.
  9. When finished, close the Controlly window. The app will continue running in the background, and you can access the settings from an icon in the menu bar.

We were able to get Controlly working with a SteelSeries Nimbus and a Kanex GoPlay Sidekick without any problems, although it’s worth noting that we had no joy at all with an older PS3 controller — even though we paired it successfully to our Mac via Bluetooth, Controlly simply refused to acknowledge its existence and kept saying no controller was connected at all.

Wiring in controllers over Lightning to USB also caused Controlly to detect them and allow them to be customized, but the actual controls themselves didn’t work until we disconnected them and opted for Bluetooth instead. We don’t think this is a huge problem, though, as the whole point of the exercise is to use a wireless controller.

Notably, Controlly does require macOS Big Sur, but it should work on any Big Sur compatible Mac.

Why This Is Useful

While there isn’t a call for most people to use a game controller to remotely control their Mac, there are a few applications where this could be very handy, and if you’re one of those people, this $4 app is going to be a great deal.

Firstly, there’s the obvious aspect of gaming. While some Mac games already natively support game controllers, through its custom key mappings, Controlly could be used to handle those games that don’t offer direct controller support, especially things like Windows games running via CrossOver, which can’t always pass game controllers through properly from the Mac side.

This would also be particularly useful for working with a Mac on a big screen, whether it’s hardwired in via HDMI or connected via AirPlay, anything that doesn’t require actual keyboard input could be handled from the comfort of your couch, and even if you also keep a Bluetooth keyboard handy for text input, a game controller can be a much more efficient way of handling the Mac than trying to use a mouse in your living room.

The sheer number of buttons available on a game controller that can be mapped to different functions could also be very helpful to users with accessibility requirements, since it keeps multiple functions within a much easier reach, and buttons can even be mapped using Controlly to complex keyboard shortcuts, allowing them to be triggered with a single press.

That said, Controlly still has room for a few improvements. It would be nice to see the ability to define multiple profiles, so that a controller could be mapped differently for different functions, whether that’s multiple games with different keyboard shortcuts, or even different contexts such as media playback versus web surfing. Support for multi-key sequences would also allow for more complex macros to be created — although this can easily be handled by using a separate utility like Keyboard Maestro, it would be nice to have it built right into Controlly.

Still, for $4, Controlly does a great job of offering a new and fun way to control your Mac when a keyboard and mouse just aren’t practical.

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