Anyone gone "left-handed" with their HOTAS controllers?

I’m right-handed and have a Thrustmaster TM16000 + TWCS throttle. While you can configure the stick to use with your right or left hand with the included accessories, the throttle is ergonomically designed to fit your left hand, thus my playing style is:
Mouse - Right hand, used for cockpit interaction.
Stick - Right hand, used for everything related to actually flying the plane and some key-binds
Throttle - Left hand, used for throttle control and also several key-binds

The biggest issue with this setup is I have to remove my hand from the stick before interacting with anything in the cockpit with the mouse. If I’m in the middle of a turn or elevation change, I can’t remove my hand from the stick. I will either wait until I’m done with the maneuver, or I’ll awkwardly try to hold the stick position with my left hand while I use my right hand on the mouse.

So my question is, for those of you with a similar controller setup, have you ever tried switching the stick and throttle and seeing how that works? Is there a better way?

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I am in this very situation with the hotas x by thrust master. It’s also left hand only. I considered buying a yoke and throttle but decided I’d already invested enough with vr and PC hardware.

I’m actually left handed and presently fly with a Virpil Alpha Left Hand grip + CM3 throttle which I use on the right. (Have also used T16000 set up for lefties.)

To be honest I’m not using the mouse at all in flight. Only within the base menu’s.
It is within reach, on a mouse pad at the base of my joystick but with head tracking or VR and so many actual buttons on joystick and throttles I rarely need to reach for it.

I guess if you are not flying military aircraft in the sim then from a pilot in command perspective it’s more realistic to have the stick either centrally or on the left with throttle to your right. There are obviously exceptions to this. I have just a TM warthog stick for now but a yoke on the way and down the track will use a left handed Virpil Alpha for stick aircraft and the TM will get re-purposed for a mini heli sim.

I think your issue is the throttle by the sounds of it so you may have to swap that out.

You could always teach yourself to use a mouse left handed. I did a few years back and it was surprisingly easy.

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I have the same HW and use the yoke to the left (inverted the plastics and settings) and throttle to the right. Easy to get used to, whatever plane I fly. The brain quickly remaps anything to what you imagine you’re using. Hey, it’s a game, most things happen in your head :slightly_smiling_face: .
P.S. I’m mostly right-handed.

How do you spin dials? Things such as altitude or heading dials, and in airliners the air speed dial?

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Instead of the mouse I use a trackball (Kensington, VERY big ball), which I operate with my left hand.

I am right-handed, so it took some time getting used to this setup. But eventually it became second nature, and I do maintain control over the aircraft at all times.

Can’t answer for the person you’re asking, but in my case, my HOTAS has a bunch of different hat and toggle switches. I have one of the hat switches configured to set the heading bug on the left-right direction, and altitude target up or down with the up/down directions. If I ever get a head tracker, I will re-bind the hat switch I use for camera point-of-view to some more AP functions, but I only really need one, which is the target airspeed for aircraft with an auto throttle.

Hmm, interesting. I guess the one thing that would be a problem for me with that setup is the push/pull action on the dials for airliners, i.e. setting managed mode vs. selected mode on the A320.

Yeah, I mean, unless you buy or build a dedicated control panel with banks of buttons and rotary controls, you’re going to have to use the mouse for some things. But realistically, even a real airliner doesn’t have all its controls on the yoke/stick and throttle. The flight crew will always have to manipulate those controls.

So the practical challenge for a simmer is to simply find the best combination of convenience and functionality, then stick with that setup and learn it inside and out so that it’s completely second nature and doesn’t get in your way while flying.

Virpil CM3 has 2 rotary encoders. (HDG and Alt)

I also have my old CM2 which also has 2 rotary encoders and finally I have 2 Koolertron programmable keypads one of which is is mapped to allow me to increase or decrease Altitude. (Depending on aircraft type sometimes the rotary encoder increments seem a little too small. The keypad mapping allows for fairly coarse adjustment if I just hold “up” or “down”