The “Why Not Both?” meme is more than a little overused when it comes to decisions between two good things, but it’s the perfect answer to the question of whether you should use a controller or a mouse to play your favorite games.

Keyboards Suck for Movement, Controllers Suck for Aim

The main problem is that keyboards are not analogue. A key is either depressed or it isn’t. This makes it essentially impossible to implement manual movement control for games using a keyboard. You have a walking speed and a sprinting speed, with nothing in between, and a significant amount of imprecision as a result. That analog thumb stick on the controller lets you precisely control the velocity of your character, and it’s intuitive.

However, as soon as you try and use that same type of thumb stick to aim, things go south quickly. When we look at something with our heads, we turn and snap to it. You don’t slowly accelerate and decelerate your head, overshoot what you wanted to look at, and then turn back. However, that’s exactly what happens with an analogue thumb stick, and it’s why any console games that require precise and fast aiming come with “aim assist” which snaps your reticle to the target or otherwise fudges it when its close enough.

So we have two halves of a good control scheme, which brings us back to…

Why Not Both?

The idea is basic—use the left half of a console controller for movement of your character and your mouse for all the aiming. This lets you get the best movement scheme in total for your game. Sure, there will be a learning curve, but you’ll get the hang of it quickly if you persevere.

However, you’ve probably already spotted one major flaw with this—a lack of buttons! With your left hand on the keyboard, you have access to numerous buttons beyond movement. With just a standard controller in your hands, you have movement, you can click the stick, and you have one trigger and one bumper. If you have a fancy controller with paddles, then you might have one or two additional buttons, which could be enough in some games.

There are a few ways to address this beyond what I just mentioned. For example, many mice these days have numerous side and thumb buttons that can be assigned to take over common things you might want to do during a game, such as tossing a grenade or melee attacks. Also, don’t forget that you have an entire D-pad on the left side of a standard controller, which is perfect for common functions like using a healing item or swapping weapons.

How to Configure Controller and Mouse Together

Whether this approach will actually work largely depends on the game that you’re trying to play. Some might not like the idea, but I’ve found that a lot of the time games will happily take inputs from multiple devices at once. One thing that does happen is that some games will rapidly switch between keyboard and controller button prompts if you use both input devices at the same time. That’s pretty annoying, but some games also have the option to set which prompts to show permanently, which might be a fix in those cases.

Games like Fallout 4 and The Outer Worlds make this setup impossible, since using the controller disables the mouse and vice versa. However, in games like Quake II it works like a charm! The only thing to do is experiment with it and see which games will play along. In Quake II in particular, I’ve found that it actually does improve my performance, since that game benefits from precise movement and jumps.

So, all that’s left is to dig through the key binding settings for your game, and assign the right function to the right button either on your controller or mouse. If you’re lucky, they should all sort into something that’s quite playable!

Dedicated Combo Peripherals

If you want to achieve the same synergy of controller and mouse on console, you don’t have quite this amount of flexibility. However, there have been a few dedicated combo controllers over the years. Sadly, they were never particularly popular, nor by all accounts much good, but it’s worth pointing out that this idea isn’t new or that outlandish.

There’s the SplitFish Shark which has various iterations for different consoles. Even HORI, which is one of the most eminent controller makers in the world, took a stab at it with the HORI Tactical Assault Commander G2.

Is Dual-Wielding Better?

Am I seriously proposing this as a solution? The truth is that most of the time I still play the traditional way with a keyboard and mouse. Well, actually I use a one-handed Tartarus V2 keyboard, but if they brought out a model of that with an analogue thum bstick, I’d be all over it.

That being said, when I have tried this “dual wielding” approach, I can’t help but think that for some folks who play multiplayer games where better movement precision could mean the difference between winning or losing, it’s worth a shot. The main reason I don’t do it all the time is because I play lots of different games, and configuring them all would be a pain, but for a small subset of games, this is a real alternative that might just give you the edge.