alakey

Yeah that’s basically what you do, but the keyboard’s firmware needs to report itself as a gamepad for it to work, Wooting offers xinput and HID modes, iirc Keychron only does xinput and then Razer I don’t remember. Unfortunately the next best thing was some smaller company that had very limited beta support for such modes, and no other company gives a shit at all.

Alternatively Steam Input would have to add support for keyboards&mice, but the suggestions on Steam forums has been unanswered since 2021, so I highly doubt it would happen any time soon.

On the off chance one of your desired features is gamepad emulation - Wooting is the only one that has a full proper implementation of it via xinput emulation. Keychron has partial support and Razer has full support but in a different manner (don’t remember the specifics).