A lot of classic PC games, RTS titles, and smaller indie projects were never built with controller support in mind, which usually means falling back to mouse and keyboard even if you’d rather play with a gamepad in hand. There’s also a simpler use case: binding something like a Discord mute toggle or an overlay shortcut directly to a controller button so you don’t have to reach for the keyboard mid-game.
DSX handles this through a feature called Sense2Key, which lets you map your DualSense’s buttons to keyboard key presses instead of standard controller input.
Setting Up Keyboard Mapping
- Open DSX and find the Sense2Key section, this is separate from your standard controller profile settings, since it specifically handles keyboard emulation rather than gamepad emulation.
- Pick the controller button you want to remap, this could be a face button, a d-pad direction, or the touchpad click.
- From the keyboard key dropdown, select whichever key you want that button to send instead of its normal input.
- Save your mapping. You can typically build out multiple bindings within the same profile if you’re remapping several buttons at once.
Building Sensible Layouts
Since a controller has far fewer inputs than a full keyboard, it helps to think in terms of what you actually need for a given game rather than trying to cover everything.
For movement in games built around WASD, mapping the left stick’s four directions to individual key presses gets you basic directional movement, though keep in mind this converts smooth analog input into more binary, on-off style movement, closer to how the keyboard itself works, since a stick tilt can only become “key pressed” or “key not pressed” rather than a graduated value.
For something like a push-to-talk or mute shortcut, the DualSense’s dedicated mute button (the small button below the PlayStation logo) is a natural fit, it’s already there and otherwise underused during regular gameplay, so repurposing it for a communication shortcut doesn’t cost you anything.
For menu or inventory access, mapping a key like “I” or “Esc” to a touchpad click or a spare face button keeps map and inventory screens within easy reach without needing to grab the keyboard for something quick.
A Real Double-Input Risk to Know About
Here’s something worth understanding before you rely on this heavily: if a game already has some level of native controller support and you’re also running Sense2Key mappings on top of it, the game can end up reading both inputs at once. Pressing a button might trigger both its normal controller action and the keyboard key you’ve mapped to it simultaneously, which can cause unexpected double actions rather than the clean single input you’re after.
HidHide is the standard fix here, the same as with other DSX use cases. By hiding your physical controller from the game and only exposing DSX’s processed output, you avoid the game reading the raw signal separately from what Sense2Key is doing with it.
- Open the HidHide Configuration Client, from its official GitHub release page if you need to install it.
- Under Devices, check the box to hide your DualSense.
- Under Applications, whitelist DSX.
- Enable hiding.
Our Drivers page covers this in more detail, along with installing ViGEmBus, which you’ll also need for DSX’s controller emulation to function properly alongside keyboard mapping.
When This Approach Makes Sense (and When It Doesn’t)
Keyboard mapping through Sense2Key works best for games with genuinely no controller support at all, older RTS titles, some indie games, certain emulators. For games that do have partial native controller support but just feel incomplete, it’s often better to check whether the game has its own remapping options first, layering Sense2Key on top of an already-functional (if imperfect) native controller implementation is exactly the scenario that causes the double-input issue described above.
If you’re mapping shortcuts for desktop utilities rather than in-game actions, Discord, overlays, media controls, that risk mostly goes away, since you’re not competing with a game’s own input handling in the first place.
Testing Your Mappings Before Committing to Them
Before building out a full layout, it’s worth testing individual bindings one at a time rather than mapping everything at once and hoping it all works. Open a text editor or a game’s chat box, and try pressing the controller button you just mapped, if the key registers correctly there, you know the binding itself is solid before you introduce it into an actual game session where a broken mapping might cost you a match or a boss attempt. This is especially worth doing for mappings tied to less common keys, function keys or modifier combinations sometimes behave inconsistently depending on the specific game engine you’re using them in.
It’s also worth revisiting your mappings occasionally rather than treating them as permanent. A layout that made sense for one game might not translate well to the next title you try Sense2Key with, movement-heavy bindings in particular tend to need per-game adjustment rather than a single universal layout.
Getting DSX Set Up
If you haven’t installed DSX yet, it’s available from its official Steam page, that’s the actively maintained, current version. This site doesn’t distribute or modify the software itself, we just point to that official source.
If your mappings aren’t registering the way you’d expect, or your controller isn’t showing up reliably in the first place, our Troubleshooting guide covers the more common connection and detection issues that can get in the way before you even get to the Sense2Key setup.