NOTE: The following instructions are for Yoke Classic, a stable version no longer in development, and available in Google Play and F-Droid

If you want a version with customizable layouts, try Yoke WebView. Yoke WebView is for the moment only available on GitHub.

Yoke Classic (desktop client)

Yoke is a hackable Android gamepad for Linux (and Windows)

Get the Android app on F-Droid, Google Play or Github.

The Linux client can be installed with

# Requires Python 3.5+ which comes pre-installed in Ubuntu 16.04 and after.
pip3 install git+https://github.com/rmst/yoke.git@v0.1 --upgrade

On Linux to enable Yoke to create gamepad devices we need to add a udev rule

yoke-enable-uinput  # you can find that script in the "bin" directory

(This can be undone via yoke-disable-uinput)

On Windows Yoke needs the vJoy driver. The installer can be downloaded here.

Now you can run the client with

yoke

Your computer should then show up in the Yoke app immediately if you are on the same network.

Extras

To test Yoke on Linux you can install, e.g. jstest-gtk:

sudo apt install jstest-gtk
jstest-gtk  # to run

To use Yoke effectively with SDL-based games (e.g. all games using Unreal Engine or Unity3D), you can install the SDL gamepad tool. (If the package is not found, download the tool from the website.)

sudo apt install gamepadtool
gamepadtool   # to run

Multiple virtual devices on the same machine

Each yoke process creates one virtual device. To run multiple processes on the same machine make sure to give them different --id numbers (any integer greater than 0).

Security

The communication between the Linux client and the Android app are unencrypted UDP messages. You should therefore use it in networks you trust. However, if you are not in a trusted environment you can always create one via USB or Bluetooth. Just enable USB or Bluetooth tethering on your Android device and connect your Linux computer. This will create a mini-network for just your Phone and Computer and Yoke will work as usual.

Tweaking

Changing the controller mapping and behaviour of certain axes is very simple. Have a look at bin/yoke which is the Python script that is used for the yoke command.

If you want to modify more low level stuff that's also pretty easy. The Yoke linux client basically consists of a single Python file yoke/service.py.