XBindJoy is a tool for making your joysticks and gamepads more useful. Bind arbitrary scheme code to joystick button presses and joystick axis movements, with bindings to libxtst to send synthetic key presses, mouse clicks, and mouse movements from that code. GNU Guile makes it easy to bind hotkeys to joystick button chords, radically change hotkey functionality at runtime, and more.
xbindjoy is significantly more powerful than other available joystick mappers. xbindjoy is configured programmatically rather than graphically, and its bindings are full scheme procedures (function with associated closure) rather than declarative mappings. Basically, instead of a mapping being "button 3 is now keyboard key R", it's "when button 3 is pressed, call function F. F is a function that sends 'keyboard key R down'". Using closures allows you to write procedures that store information and interact, so you can do things like slowly increase mouse movement velocity by holding down one button and slowly slow down with another. If antimicro is HTML, xbindjoy is HTML+JavaScript.
The only thing antimicro and qjoypad have that xbindjoy doesn't is cross platform functionality. xbindjoy depends on X and the Linux joystick API. antimicro and qjoypad may also be easier for non-technical users to get running because they're concrete point-and-click interfaces, though I haven't done any user experience studies. I provide convenience functions for straightforward tasks (things that antimicro could handle) but no DSL will be more user-friendly than "press button, press associated key".
- Use your gamepad with any game, even ones that don't understand joysticks.
- Bind joystick axes to mouse movement for aiming in FPS games.
- Turn any joystick into a chorded keyboard + mouse combo.
- Joystick macros everywhere For Great Real-Time Strategy Justice.
- Bind window manager functionality to a more ergonomic input device.
- Playing Minecraft? Make crouch a toggle and never fall into lava again.
sudo apt-get install libev-dev libxtst-dev guile-2.0-dev libx11-dev
make testmake test runs the example script in examples/generic.scm, which serves as
a demonstration of a bunch of this project's features.
There are probably bugs lurking in the event logic that will bite you when you least expect it. Installing the compiled library (xbindjoy.scm and libguilexbindjoy.so) to your system is painful and it's easier to run it out of the build directory. Please submit bug reports or pull requests.
- Authors: Check the copyright notices in each file
- License: GPL General Public License v3