XFE Companion

SteamShell XFE Companion

The controller half of SteamShell, for people running Windows' Xbox Full Screen Experience instead of replacing the shell.

It does not replace, install or modify the Windows shell. It is portable — run it, close it, delete it.

Why it exists

Xbox FSE gives you a console-style front end but leaves Windows itself awkward from the couch. XFE adds the Quick Menu, a controller pointer, display and audio control, and RTSS frame capping — inside FSE, where they otherwise are not reachable.

The one thing that makes it hard

XInput reads zeros inside Xbox FSE. The obvious way to read a controller does not work in the exact environment this product targets.

So XFE reads the pad through RawInput, decoding HID reports directly. That works, but it needs to understand your controller's report layout — there is a built-in layout for the ROG Ally, and any other pad can be taught.

If your controller does nothing inside FSE but works on the desktop, that is this, and the learner is the fix.

What you get

• Quick Menu — the same menu as the shell
• Controller pointer and remappable buttons
• Display mode, resolution, refresh rate, scale, HDR
• Default audio output switching
• RTSS overlay and frame limiter, including an opt-in elevated helper
• Startup programs
• Lightweight assist — game focus, Steam assist, launcher cleanup

What you do not get

Everything that only makes sense for a shell: boot-to-Big-Picture, the full window engine, taskbar hiding, desktop blackout, desktop mode, Setup Assistant's shell registration.

There is also no desktop automatic-mouse mode, and that is an architectural rule rather than an omission — the companion's own validator forbids reintroducing it, so that doing so has to be a deliberate decision rather than a drift.

Installing

Run SteamShell.exe and pick the companion in the Setup Assistant, or take SteamShell-XFE.exe and run it directly. Its settings live beside the executable.

Differences worth knowing

• Vocabulary. Buttons are labelled in FSE's terms — "Game Bar", "Back / Escape" — and it offers TaskView, WindowsDesktop and Settings actions the shell does not.
• Disable switch. The companion can be stood down entirely without exiting, which the shell has no equivalent for.
• Heartbeat. It logs that it is still responsive while FSE is in front, because a companion that has quietly died looks exactly like one that is working.
• Settings schema 18, versioned separately from the shell's 23.

Shared with the shell

Most of it. Both compile the same SteamShell-Common.ahk and SteamShell-Shared.ahk, and the build fails if a shared function drifts or a fix lands in one product and not the other. Deliberate differences are recorded, with reasons, in DIVERGENT_FUNCTIONS.txt.