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Steam Controller update will let you bind actions to double and long presses on buttons

Steam Controller

A new update has been released for Steam Controllers on the Steam Beta Client, introducing ‘Activators’, a new functionality that allows you to bind actions to double presses and long presses on buttons. 

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“Activators sit between inputs (such as a button on the controller) and binding outputs (such as a keypress),” explains the official blurb. “They control how the input is turned into output and provide a number of settings to control this. Some simple examples are long press, double press, binding cycling, toggles, and delays.”

You can put both of these Activators on any button, meaning you could potentially have each button perform three functions and each can be assigned its own haptic setting.

Here are a few ways that activators can make your existing configurations better:

  • You can use a Start Press activator and a Release Press activator to turn a toggle crouch into a hold crouch. Conversely, the toggle option will allow you to turn any action, such as a hold crouch, into a toggle.
  • Turbo can be set on Activators, meaning any button can have customized rapid fire. This can be combined with multiple activators, so single press for single fire, while a long press will engage turbo mode.
  • Use a Start Press Activator to switch to a new action set, with a Release Press on the same button to switch back to the original set. Using this technique Action Sets can act like an entire-controller mode shift. Also included in this update is the ability to copy any existing Action Set into the new set, making customization a lot faster.
  • Mode Shifts now also use Activators, so a mode-shift can be toggled on and off without continuously holding a button.
  • Activators can also cycle through a set of bindings. Put Stand, Crouch, and Prone on a single button and cycle through them with each press.

Along with Activators, the update includes “better visualizations for settings such as deadzones, with more coming soon”.

If you have opted into the beta client you can try it out, but settings will not carry over when the update is released onto Steam proper.