Honestly, I don’t. They don’t do anything and I only click them while bored on waiting screens.

Depends on the game a lot.
Sometimes it’s just ABXY buttons where I don’t wanna move my thumb off the right joystick.
Sometimes, one paddle activates a layer shift to have more mappings.
Like if a game has more controls than you could fit, layers can help extend the possibilities and paddles area decent way of activating them.
If a game is heavy on QTEs, like spam X really fast to do something, I might just map a paddle to enable a layer shift that turbo spams the other button.

I actually bind the top two as clones of the bumpers, Maybe I just have small hands and that’s why I’ve always liked PlayStation controllers more? But the bumpers on the Deck feel like a reach and not somewhere to comfortably rest your fingers on.

For the other two it’s normally duck & jump, or some button you have to regularly hold down while doing other things.

Clones of face buttons.

Discord Push-to-Talk.

In Factorio the keyboard modifiers (alt, ctrl) are back there.

Depends on the game. Most common setup is just mapping the ABXY buttons to them, so I don’t have to take my finger off the right thumb stick to press them. In Elden Ring I use them for dpad presses instead, because I need to cycle spells/use recovery items without stopping moving.

I know a lot of people use them for L3 R3 instead of clicking the sticks.

In a couple games with smaller text I use one for toggling the magnifier, or in keyboard heavy games for opening the keyboard.

The only time I ever use them is by accident.

i use mine a lot. for WoW I have them set to scroll wheel in and out, auto run and mount

for other games I tend to use them for combo button presses. or set up specific layer commands with them.

Most frequent uses?

1. Voice typing when using decky dictation if I’m in web browser, or text chatting in Discord or an MMO or something.

2. Alternate inputs for stick-click functions, since I very much dislike clicking the sticks.

I’ll use it with some emulators to trigger the menu bar so I can adjust settings.

I used it in fallout 4 to zoom since the pop it text was so small.

I used it a bit for save states and fast forwarding at one point too.

For emulators:

• L4-R4 select save state slot, L5-R5 save/load
• Not back buttons, but: Select + A/B/X/Y for Ctrl-Q, F11, etc

In general:

• Press R4 to start pressing A every 500ms so e.g. it picks the next level and various confirmation popups automatically
• Press L4 once to keep another button pressed, e.g. R1 in racing games

I don’t remember any others off the top of my head, but the gist is that when I’m annoyed by some weird specific input I start fiddling with Steam input for a few minutes to try and make it work more easily 😅

For RTS (especially AoE II DE) I use them as:

• the SHIFT key(create 5 units instead of 1 when hold)
• activator for a different action group, where the joystick are mapped to a circular menu. E.g. one of these menu assigns units to one of the 6 quick groups in my circular menu, and I can then select these units with just the right joystick (no button pressed). Another one activates a right joystick circular menu to go to a building (and I did map nearly all building types…)

I can also combine these, to e.g. select all barracks

One of the laziest way that I use on all my game is to bind them to joystick presses(really can’t hold joysticks down while twisting it all over).

Two on the left goes to left joystick, two on the right goes to the right joystick.(Yes I bind two at a time since I find pressing them individually is hard when panicking.)

I think I have only used them for a single thing, in an emulator, to preform designated emulator functions like toggling full screen.

Otherwise I do not use them.

Typically L1/R1 shoulder buttons or L3/R3 stick click buttons since those are difficult for me. The rear L4/R4 ones are easier to use. Depends on the game and which I am using the most.

R5 I frequently map to take screenshots depending on the game. Except in emulators R5 is fast forward. The rest of emulator settings are a left touchpad menu that I set up almost identically visually for all emulators as possible so it’s easier for me to hop between systems. L5 gets used the least.

For more complex games, typically older ones where I have to get super creative (like Sacred 2), I use the back buttons totally differently as gameplay needs it and as is comfortable.

Sometimes I find the custom control tinkering as much fun as the game. Trying to find a setup that works for me, tweaking as I go for the first few hours of gameplay, and eventually I save as a template with detailed info in it so I never lose it. I use templates for saving because the other save options are less reliable.

bottom left is crouch, bottom right is jump. I use the same bindings with my modded dualsense.