For an in-depth exploration of these suggestions, along with some other tips, like handling mixed input issues and improving trigger soft pull feel, check out my video guide. There are timestamps in the description.

~ General ~

Change Primary Click/Fire to Left Trigger: Separating your firing finger from the hand of your aiming thumb removes a major source of jitter, while improving long-term comfort and ergonomics, especially considering the lower position of Right Pad from Right Trigger. This also makes actions like click-dragging way easier.

Increase Trackpad Press Threshold: The default is 4096 out of 32000, which is very easy to accidentally trigger. I like to increase mine to over 9000 ;)

~ First-Person/Third-Person Shooters ~

Set Trackpad As Mouse: For most games, it defaults to Joystick, which is usually terrible. Change it.

Reduce Vertical Scale: I like 40% or lower. Stable horizontal turning is important, since you turn left and right across a full 360-degree range, much more than you look up and down (usually only up to 90 degrees). Also, gravity pulls you to the same vertical level as your enemies.

Increase Trackball Friction: If it’s too hard to control, or sometimes flies off unintentionally, try High Friction or even turn off Trackball Emulation completely. I set it to High, and also max out Vertical Friction to 200. I don’t really do trackball flicks to turn, instead I…

Increase Sensitivity + Use With Gyro: I raise my sens so a full edge-to-edge swipe does a 360 circle, but you don’t need to go that high.

I set Gyro to the new Gyro To Mouse mode. While I use Gyro for fine aim, I use the trackpad for fast, responsive, accurate turning like Flick Stick. IMO, my “Turnpad + Gyro” works even better and is much more comfortable. Looking up/down and recentering feels way more natural and effortless. With Trackpad + Gyro, I find I rely on gyro far less than I do with Stick + Gyro, which is another plus for ergonomics.

I could feasibly aim with just trackpad (no gyro) at a lower sensitivity. It’s harder, but I’m still much better with it than stick-only aim (no aim assist or gyro).

Increase Smoothing: I often just max out to 40. Enough to reduce jitter/choppiness, e.g. from just lifting/placing your thumb on the pad. Since I use Gyro for fine aiming, the slight precision lost by increasing smoothing has not been an issue in practice; in fact, I think smooth pad turning complements Gyro aim well.

Find Your Ideal Rotation Value: I find this is not essential but does help. Open Chrome, go to kleki.com (a paint website), then close your eyes and draw strokes left and right. You may notice they are tilted. You have a natural angle that your thumb swipes across the trackpad. Try adjusting Rotation to match this angle so you draw more level lines. Go in-game and tweak if necessary. (IMO they should let you set a global default and also provide a built-in visualizer/calibrator like they do for stick deadzones.) Some people like to set it to a full diagonal 45, to maximize swipe range.

~ Twin-Stick Shooters, Top-Down, Strategy, 3DS Games, etc. ~

Try Mouse Region Mode, mapped to the whole screen: Tweak the parameters such that it maps the trackpad 1-to-1 with the screen. The process is admittedly annoying: start with a smaller region, make sure it’s centered, increase size so you can hit top/bottom screen edges easily, then increase horizontal scale until you can hit left/right screen edges easily. If you don’t need to reach the whole screen, you can reduce the region size for more precision.

Depending on the game, you may find this controls better than either Joystick or Trackpad As Mouse. I like to play Noita and Hades this way. It works better for games with chonkier UI elements, like Into the Breach (yes I know that has controller support, but I still prefer Fullscreen Mouse Region.)

Some other games I’ve heard this works well: Halls of Torment, Enter the Gungeon

~ Misc. Tips ~

Thumb Pivoting: Practice fine control by keeping your thumb in one place, pointed slightly, and moving the cursor between targets or icons that are close to each other.

In case you didn’t know, in Desktop Mode, the Left Trackpad is a scroll wheel. Move your thumb clockwise/counterclockwise, not up/down. You can open and edit your Desktop Mode configuration like you can for any game: it’s buried in the settings in both Game Mode and the desktop Steam app.

Once you dial in your settings, save your layout as a template to reuse for similar games, or jot down the values you like to change from default. Some values, like sensitivity, will be different per game.

I didn’t get into the more obvious uses for the trackpads, like custom action menus, because there are already great guides on YouTube for that. Search “steam deck trackpad” for a start.

Final rant: While this sounds like a pain to set up the first time (especially with the unhelpful UI), it gets a lot easier the more you do it. If you’re willing to put in the hours to get perfect graphical settings, tweaking FSR, TDP, installing CryoUtilities, etc. then I think it’s worth just a little more time to dial in how your game controls and feels as well, not just how it looks.