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Menus

Turn a stick, a touchpad, or any two recorded axes into an on-screen ring or grid of commands.

A menu puts a set of commands on an input surface. Engage the surface and a ring or grid appears on screen. Point at a cell and it highlights. Depending on the fire mode, the cell's binding fires on click, on release, or the whole time it is hovered. It is the same idea as Steam Input's radial and touch menus, and configs imported from the Steam Workshop bring theirs along.

Each slot has its own menu list. Open a slot, switch to the Menus tab, and click Add. Remove and Duplicate manage the list.

Style

Style How cells are picked
Radial Ring By direction. The ring splits into equal wedges, straight up is the first cell, and the wedges run clockwise. Works best on a stick. A radial menu can also carry a Center Cell, selected while the stick rests inside the engage deadzone.
Touch Grid By position. Cells lay out on a near-square grid, wider than tall (4 cells make 2×2, 12 make 4×3), and your touch point picks the cell under it. Works best on a touchpad.

Opens With

The Opens With picker sets the input that opens and steers the menu. It reads the physical controllers assigned to the slot, never the virtual controller's layout. The cell bindings below are what the menu outputs. A Record button next to the picker captures the host from a live input, and a reset restores the default (Right Stick).

Host How it engages
Left Stick / Right Stick When the stick leaves the Engage Deadzone (default 25).
Touchpad 1 and up On touch. A Pad Half picker (Whole Pad, Left Half, Right Half) narrows the menu to half the pad, so one pad can carry two menus, the way Steam treats the PS touchpad as two.
Custom Axes Record any two axes as Steer X and Steer Y, then push past the deadzone like a stick. This is how joysticks, wheels, and other non-gamepad devices host menus.

Click Input

Click Input sets the button the On Click and On Click Release fire modes read, recordable from any assigned device. Left empty it shows (host default): the stick click for a stick host, the trackpad click for a touchpad. A Custom Axes host has no default click, so record one before using those two fire modes.

Fire Mode

Mode When a cell fires
On Click (default) The hovered cell's binding holds the whole time the host surface is clicked.
On Click Release The hovered cell fires once when the click releases.
On Touch Release The last hovered cell fires once when you let go: the finger lifts, or the stick returns inside the deadzone. Letting go with nothing hovered dismisses the menu without firing.
While Hovered The hovered cell is active the entire time it is hovered. No click needed.

Cells

Cells sets how many cells the menu carries, 1 to 20. For a radial menu that is the ring count, with the optional Center Cell on top. Each cell has:

  • A Label, rendered on the overlay.
  • A binding: None, a Keyboard Key, a Controller Button, or a Macro.
  • An optional icon, set with the icon button on the row. See Cell icons.

Controller Button speaks the slot's own lettering: Xbox letters on an Xbox slot, DualShock symbols on a PlayStation slot, Nintendo letters on a Nintendo slot, and the custom layout's numbered buttons on an Extended slot. Keyboard + Mouse, MIDI, and VR slots have no controller buttons to press, so the choice is not offered there, and a button binding left behind by a slot-type switch shows as Controller Button (not on this slot type).

Macro cells

Macro fires one of the slot's macros by name. The choice appears once the slot has at least one macro, and picking it preselects the first one.

The cell is an extra trigger for the macro rather than a copy of it, so the macro's own fire mode decides what happens: a While Held macro runs for as long as an On Click cell is held, and a one-shot mode sees the cell's fire as one press. The macro's Layer scope and the rest of its settings apply unchanged. A macro with no trigger of its own can be driven entirely from cells.

Renaming the macro updates every cell that names it. A cell whose macro no longer exists shows as <name> (no such macro) in the picker and does nothing until you pick another. Macro names on a slot are not unique. When two share a name, the cell fires the first.

Cells as sources

Every cell also fires as a menu-item source, pickable in Mappings rows and macro triggers as entries like Menu 1 Cell 3. A cell set to None still fires this way, so a cell can do real work with no direct binding. A cell driven through a mapping row or macro shows Used by a mapping or macro in its binding picker while it has no direct binding of its own.

A menu imported from the Steam Workshop can carry richer cell behavior (key combos, layer switches, macros). Those arrive wired through the profile's mapping rows and macros automatically, so the cell fires whatever the config authored even though the cell row here shows no direct binding.

Cell icons

Each cell row carries an icon button (tooltip: Choose this cell's icon: an entry from an icon package or an image file.). It opens a Pick an Icon list of every icon in every added icon package, each listed as the image name followed by its package name. Pick one and the cell shows it. (No Icon) at the top clears an icon that is set. With no packages added and no icon set, the button goes straight to a file browser.

The browser accepts:

  • A loose image file: .png, .jpg, .jpeg, .bmp, or .gif. A file kept under PadForge's own folder is stored by relative path, so the pair travels together.
  • A .pficons package. Picking one adds it to the list below and offers its icons. A package with a single image binds it right away.

On the overlay the icon draws at the center of the cell, 30 pixels tall at the menu's normal size. Icon Size next to the icon button scales that cell's icon on its own, from 25% to 200% of the menu's normal icon size, so one cell can read louder than its neighbors without resizing the menu. The row appears only once the cell has an icon, and clearing the icon puts the size back to 100%. With Show Labels on, the icon sits above the label. An icon that cannot be found (a removed package, a moved file) falls back to the label alone. Menus imported from the Steam Workshop keep their Steam icon names and draw them from the local Steam client's art as before.

Icon packages

The Icon Packages block on the Menus tab

An icon package is one zip file of images with the .pficons extension. PadForge reads straight from the file and never unpacks it. Keep packages next to PadForge.exe to stay portable.

The Icon Packages block on the Menus tab manages them:

Button What it does
Add Package… Add an existing .pficons file to the list.
Create Package… Pick image files and save them as a new .pficons package. The new package is added at once.
Remove Remove the selected package from the list. The file is not deleted.

A package's name comes from a manifest.json inside the zip ({"name": "..."}) when one exists, otherwise from the file name. A second package with the same name is listed as name (2). A cell remembers its icon as package/entry, so a profile shared with someone who has the same package finds the icon on their machine.

Exporting a profile as a .pfprofile bundles every icon package its menus reference, the same way it bundles sound packages. Importing lands them beside PadForge.exe, reuses a byte-identical copy already there, renames on a name clash, and rewrites the profile's icon references to whatever name the package registered under.

The overlay

While a menu is engaged, a click-through overlay draws the ring or grid at the configured spot on the primary monitor, with the hovered cell highlighted in PadForge's ember accent. It never steals focus from the game.

Per-menu appearance controls: Show Labels, Screen Position (X and Y percent, default centered), Size (10–400%), and Opacity (5–100%, default 90).

The overlay itself is optional. The Dashboard's Overlays card carries a Menu Overlay toggle, on by default. Turn it off and menus still hover and fire, just without the picture, which suits layouts you know by muscle memory. One menu shows at a time: the first one engaged wins until it disengages.

Each menu carries a Layer picker naming the shift layer that permits it. Any Layer is the default and the menu is always available. Base also allows the menu under other active layers. A named layer permits the menu only while that layer is the active one.

Layer Holds the Menu Open changes how the menu opens. Normally a menu opens when you touch its surface or deflect its stick past the engage deadzone. With this on, the named layer opens it: the menu appears the moment the layer goes active and stays up for as long as it is held, and a Steer With picker chooses the physical input that moves the highlight while it is open. That input is read from the controllers assigned to the slot, and what each cell fires still comes from the cell's own binding. Any Layer and Base keep normal surface opening, so the toggle only does something on a named layer.

The fire modes read a little differently in this mode. On Click holds the highlighted cell's binding while the click input is held, and a highlighted radial center can fire with the stick at rest. On Click Release fires once when the click input releases, falling back to the previous selection if the surface releases in the same instant. On Touch Release fires when you lift off or return inside the engage deadzone while the menu stays open, and leaving the layer also commits a selection still being steered.

A menu imported from a Steam config that lived on an action layer engages only while that layer is held. Releasing the layer counts as letting go, so an On Touch Release menu commits its hovered cell right there, matching Steam's mode-shift behavior.

The row reset restores Any Layer and turns layer-held opening off.

Reset buttons

Every setting row on the Menus tab carries a per-field reset, and the overlay card has a reset of its own.

Last updated for PadForge 4.5.0.