I’m a music producer, dj and blablabla so i use a bunch of midi controllers with faders, knobs, pads etc. and always when i play EVE i think about using all of those controllers to fly the ship or simply map some faders for the engine control, pads for targets etc. using the Click–>Learn on the Control mapping.
Don’t know if it’s possible yet.
If you have software that sees input changes from the controller, it should have an option to map those inputs to other types of inputs. Or some sort of software should exist for it.
Possibly crazy, but you could probably do this with Max from Cycling 74.
If you’ve got Ableton Live Suite, that includes Max, so check out the Max environment to see what the options are. I’ve never tried to build maps to Mac functions, but what I imagine you would want to do here is use the Max engine to Mac keyboard commands that are bound in EVE (i.e. CTRL for target lock, F1 for fire, etc.). That would get you the boolean commands that the keyboard could offer. Things that are variable (acceleration, turning, etc.) would be a lot trickier, but maybe possible.
Edit:
Found a tutorial on how to do this controller to Mac keyboard mapping: