Have you ever wondered if you can use the mouse without using a mouse? It’s not a joke and not even a tongue twister, rather a curious reality, in fact for those who do not know, you can use the Xbox One/360 controller as a mouse, let’s find out how.
This article is dedicated to all those who have a desktop computer or a laptop in the living room and not having available a desk, or having connected the PC to the LCD TV home, they need to use your remote computer, maybe while sitting comfortably on the sofa.
Many of you will already be thinking that making it possible to use the controller as a mouse is a long and complicated process between calibration, device installation and driver problems, and yet it is quite the opposite, nothing simpler.
Of course, in order to activate the mouse function on the controller, we will need to recognize the Xbox pad to our PC, then simply connect the joypad through a USB input and thanks to Windows 7/8/10 operating systems, our controller will be automatically recognized, installed, calibrated and you can use it immediately as a controller for our games on PC.
The next step will be to use the controller as a mouse, so once our pad is correctly installed on our PC we will have to download an executable script called “Gopher“, easily downloaded from GitHub.
Once downloaded Gopher on our computer, just start it with a double click (always and only after connecting the controller), Gopher will start automatically and after a few seconds we can safely reduce it to the icon leaving it active in the background, at this point, moving the analog pads of our pad, we will notice that we will be able to move the mouse pointer and with the pad keys we will also be able to take advantage of the left and right click functions inside the windows interface.
We must make a necessary clarification, the Gopher software will stop working when they blow out or we will start the pc and when we wanted to use Gopher on the next reboot, we’ll put this script in the folder of the Windows autostart. To do this, simply copy and paste the Gopher executable following these simple steps: click on the search in the windows taskbar (next to the Windows start), type “execute” and click on the file you just found.
Once inside the “execute” file write in the command line the phrase “shell: startup” (quotation marks excluded), and give the enter.
At this point, it will open the Windows autorun folder, point with the mouse pointer on the Gopher script and with the right button of the latter copy it and paste it into the autorun folder.
After this simple procedure, you will have to do is restart your computer and check if all the procedure will be successful, if everything works perfectly, Gopher will start automatically immediately after Windows logon. Congratulations, you’ve just turned your Xbox controller into a comfortable remote mouse.