QWERTY vs Dvorak vs Colemak: choosing a keyboard layout

Sooner or later every keen typist looks down at the keyboard and wonders whether the letters are in the wrong place. They probably are, in the sense that nobody designing a layout from scratch today would put them where QWERTY does. The harder question is whether moving them is worth months of feeling like a beginner again. This guide walks through the seven layouts people actually use or argue about, puts them side by side, and adds up what switching actually costs.

Why QWERTY looks the way it does

QWERTY comes from the typewriters Christopher Latham Sholes worked on in the 1870s, which were later sold by Remington. The familiar story is that the layout was arranged to keep common letter pairs apart so the metal typebars would not jam. Historians still argue about how much of that is true and how much the layout simply evolved through trial, error and patent tweaks. What nobody argues about is that it was not designed for touch typists on modern keyboards.

A few things stand out once you look at QWERTY with fresh eyes:

• The home row (A S D F G H J K L) holds very few of the most common English letters. E, T, O and R all sit on the row above.
• The left hand does a bit more than half the work in English text, even though most people are right-handed. You can type stewardesses without touching a key with your right hand.
• Common pairs like ed, ce and my fall on the same finger, which is slow because one finger has to finish one key before starting the next.

And yet QWERTY works. People type well over 150 WPM on it. It is on every computer you will ever borrow, every phone, every library terminal and every job test. That universality is its biggest feature, and it is the main thing you give up when you leave.

A quick note on variants: the UK and US versions of QWERTY share the same letters but move a few symbols. The @ and " keys swap places, the UK board adds £ and a # key near Enter, and the Enter key itself is a different shape. If your quotes keep turning into at signs, your computer is set to the wrong one.

AZERTY and QWERTZ: the national layouts

Most of the world uses a local cousin of QWERTY rather than an alternative design. These layouts exist because other languages need other letters, and because typewriter makers adapted the arrangement country by country.

AZERTY

AZERTY is standard in France and, in a slightly different form, in Belgium. Compared with QWERTY, A and Q swap places, Z and W swap places, and M moves to the right of L on the home row. Accented letters like é, è, à and ç sit on the number row without Shift, which means the digits themselves need Shift. That last detail trips up anyone moving between the two layouts, and it makes number-heavy work slower than it needs to be.

France published a revised AZERTY standard in 2019, but most computers there still ship with the traditional version.

QWERTZ

QWERTZ is used in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and much of central Europe. The headline change is that Y and Z swap, since Z is far more common in German than Y. The right side of the board holds ä, ö, ü and, on the German version, ß, which pushes several symbols to new spots.

Neither AZERTY nor QWERTZ is meant to be more efficient than QWERTY. They are QWERTY adapted for a language. If you type mainly in French or German, the local layout is almost always the right choice, because the accented letters are a single keystroke away.

Dvorak: the original challenger

August Dvorak and his brother-in-law William Dealey patented their layout in 1936 after studying letter frequencies and how hands move. The design is easy to remember: all five vowels sit under the left hand on the home row (A O E U I) and the most common consonants sit under the right (D H T N S). Typing in English bounces between the hands, which feels pleasantly rhythmic once you are used to it.

The commonly quoted figure is that around 70% of English keystrokes land on Dvorak's home row, against roughly a third on QWERTY. Your fingers simply travel less. Punctuation moves too: the apostrophe, comma and full stop sit on the top row under the left hand.

What about speed? The early studies that showed large gains were tied to Dvorak himself, and later comparisons found much smaller differences. As things stand, nobody has shown convincingly that Dvorak makes trained typists dramatically faster. Plenty of people find it more comfortable, and that is a fair reason on its own.

The practical downsides are real. Dvorak moves almost every letter, so you are learning from zero. It also scatters the shortcuts: Ctrl+C, V, X and Z all end up in different places. macOS offers a "Dvorak, QWERTY ⌘" option that switches back to QWERTY whenever you hold Command, which helps. On the plus side, Dvorak is built into Windows, macOS and Linux, so you can turn it on anywhere without installing anything.

Colemak and Colemak-DH

Shai Coleman released Colemak in 2006 with a very different philosophy. Instead of starting over, it moves only 17 keys away from their QWERTY positions. Z, X, C and V stay exactly where they are, so undo, cut, copy and paste do not move. Q, W and A stay too. Caps Lock becomes a second Backspace, which sounds odd and then quickly feels obvious.

The Colemak home row reads A R S T D H N E I O. Its home-row usage is in the same region as Dvorak's, and it keeps the most common letters under the strongest fingers. Because so much of the board stays familiar, the switch is usually a bit gentler than Dvorak's, and you can still type on a QWERTY machine without feeling completely lost.

What the DH mod changes

Colemak's main criticism is that D and H sit in the middle columns, so the index fingers stretch sideways for two very common letters. Colemak-DH, a community modification, moves D and H down to the bottom row and brings G and M onto the home row in their place. The home row becomes A R S T G M N E I O.

There are a few versions of DH, tuned for ordinary staggered keyboards and for ortholinear or split boards where the keys sit in straight columns. If you are starting Colemak today, most of the community will tell you to learn the DH version from day one. We agree.

Availability is the weak point. Classic Colemak ships with macOS and most Linux systems, and on Windows it has traditionally needed a small installer. Colemak-DH usually means installing a layout file or programming it into a keyboard that runs custom firmware.

Workman

Workman appeared in 2010, designed by OJ Bucao. It starts from the observation that fingers are not equally good at every key. The index fingers dislike moving sideways, and reaching straight up with the middle and ring fingers feels easier than curling them down. Workman's home row is A S H T G Y N E O I, and it tries to keep the index fingers in their own columns.

It moves more keys than Colemak. Z and X stay put, but C and V shift one key to the right, so copy and paste move slightly. Its community is smaller than Colemak's, which matters more than you might think: fewer guides, fewer people to ask, and fewer keyboards with ready-made settings.

The layouts side by side

If you only remember one row, remember the shortcut column. It decides how annoying your first month will be far more than any finger-travel statistic.

What switching really costs

This is the part enthusiast posts tend to skip. Switching layouts is not a weekend project.

• Your speed falls off a cliff. Someone at 70 WPM on QWERTY should expect to be around 10 to 20 WPM in the first days on a new layout. Many switchers report needing one to three months of daily practice to get back to their old speed. Some end up faster, some end up about the same, and some quietly give up.
• Work suffers in the meantime. If you type for a living, a month at half speed is a real cost. Plan the switch for a quiet period, or practise the new layout on the side.
• Other people's computers. Shared office machines, a partner's laptop, school computers, job typing tests. You will be on QWERTY for all of them.
• QWERTY gets rusty. The two layouts interfere with each other. People who keep both usually get noticeably slower on one unless they practise both.
• Passwords. Many people type passwords purely from muscle memory. After a switch you may find you genuinely do not know what yours are. Write them into a password manager before you start.
• Games and apps. WASD movement and single-letter shortcuts in editors and design tools are mapped by position in some programs and by letter in others. Expect some remapping.

Should you switch?

For most people, no. If you still look at the keys or type with a few fingers, learning to touch type properly on QWERTY will make you far faster than any layout change. Our touch typing guide is the place to start, and the gains there are measured in tens of WPM, not single digits.

Switching starts to make sense in a few situations:

• You are learning touch typing from scratch anyway, and you only type on your own machines.
• You already touch type well, you enjoy the hobby side of typing, and you can afford a slow month.
• You want less finger movement for comfort. That is a reasonable preference, but a layout is not a treatment. If your hands or wrists hurt, see a doctor or physiotherapist and read our typing ergonomics guide before changing anything.

If you do switch, our pick for most English typists is Colemak-DH. It keeps the shortcuts where they are, cuts finger travel a lot, and has the largest active community of the modern layouts. Choose Dvorak if you want something built into every operating system with nothing to install. Choose Workman if you have tried Colemak-DH and something about it bothers you.

How to switch without losing your mind

1. Record a baseline. Take three 1-minute tests on QWERTY and write down the middle score and your accuracy. You will want this number later, on the bad days.
2. Decide between cold turkey and gradual. Cold turkey means switching every device at once and living with the slowdown. It is faster to learn but hard on work. Gradual means 20 to 30 minutes a day on the new layout while you keep QWERTY for everything else. It takes longer and the layouts interfere more, but you can still do your job.
3. Do not relabel the keys. Print a layout diagram and tape it below your screen. Looking down is the habit you are trying to avoid.
4. Start with home-row words. On Colemak, words like arts, stone, horse, notes and theirs use only the home row. On Dvorak, try those, south, hounds and detain. Paste a list of them into custom text on the Presspace home page and repeat it until it feels boring.
5. Add rows one at a time. Top row next, then bottom row, then punctuation. Do not rush to real sentences.
6. Test weekly, not daily. One set of 1-minute tests a week is enough to see the trend without getting discouraged by daily wobbles.

A note on using Presspace while you switch: the tests read the characters your computer sends, so they work with whatever layout you have selected. The typing lessons and the keyboard heatmap in the Stats panel are drawn for QWERTY, so read the heatmap by letter rather than by position. The structure in our daily practice routine also works well for a layout switch; just give each stage twice as long.

Your next step: take three 1-minute tests today and write down the middle score. Whether you switch or stay, that number tells you where you really are, and it is the only fair way to judge whether a new layout was worth it.

Questions people ask

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