Controls in LineXinBar: gamepad, keyboard, mouse and touch

Controllers

Plug in a pad — Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo, 8BitDo, the Steam Controller — and the whole desktop is yours from the sofa. Nothing needs setting up first.

Buttons are named by where they are, not by their letter, so the bottom face button selects on every layout — even Nintendo's, where A sits on the other side. A pad that goes to sleep and comes back, or is plugged in half-way through, simply works.

Handhelds are a first-class target: the shell is meant to run well on a Steam Deck-class machine, with its power use kept down and a low-end mode for when that is not enough.

The guide button

The guide button belongs to the shell, and no application can take it — it is the way out of anything that is holding everything else.

Games normally read a controller directly, so a pad cannot be held back the way a keyboard can. LineXinBar takes each pad and gives the rest of the machine back an identical one with a single button missing: same name, same buttons, same rumble, just no guide. Games see the pad they expected, and the guide opens every time.

And a press you made in the guide is not also the game's: whatever your thumb is still holding when you go back is let go of first, so closing the guide with A does not fire the game's A too.

Button hints

The corner opposite the clock says what the buttons do on the screen in front of you — Select, Options, Guide.

Each is drawn rather than lettered: a picture of the button cluster with the one in question filled in, which is true on every make of pad. And it is named for whichever control is in your hand — pick up the keyboard and it says Enter; touch the pad again and it goes back to the pad. Options only appears where a press would really open something. Once you know them, Settings › System › Button hints turns them off everywhere at once.

This website does the same: look at the bottom right while you switch between a controller and the keyboard.

Keyboard

The arrows browse, Enter selects, Esc goes back, and Super on its own opens the guide.

On the start screen any letter you type begins a search of the whole bar. Super is watched for as a key pressed and released on its own, so every Super chord still works; and Alt+Tab walks the guide's deck of windows the way every desktop does. Keyboard layouts are chosen under Settings, from the full list the system knows.

On-screen keyboard

A console has no keyboard, so the shell is one. It comes up by itself when an application puts the cursor in a text field, and can be called up by hand at any time.

It follows your keyboard layout, and a small chip in the corner offers it whenever a field could use it.

Mouse and touch

A click does exactly what moving there and pressing A would. One rule shapes the rest of it.

Things that stand still — the guide, a menu, a panel's buttons, the on-screen keyboard — light up under the pointer and answer the first click. Things that move when selected — the bar's rows — take one click to select and another to act, because a hover that selected would slide the row away and leave the cursor walking the bar on its own. The wheel scrolls, and a tap on a touchscreen is a click.

This site's start screen follows the same rule: a click on a row lights it and slides it to the middle of the bar, and a click on the lit row opens it. The guide and its menu, which stand still, answer the first click.

Keybindings

The defaults, all of which except the guide can be changed in the [keybindings] table of the configuration file.