QWERTY vs Dvorak vs Colemak

Almost every keyboard sold ships with QWERTY, a layout designed for mechanical typewriters in the 1870s. Two well-known alternatives, Dvorak (patented in 1936) and Colemak (released in 2006), rearrange the letters so that common keys sit under your resting fingers. Enthusiasts swear by them. The honest short answer: they can make typing more comfortable, but for most people they will not make typing meaningfully faster.

The three layouts at a glance

*Approximate figures for English text, widely quoted by layout analysers. Exact numbers vary with the corpus used.

QWERTY: the one everyone knows

QWERTY’s letter placement was shaped by the typewriters of Christopher Latham Sholes, and it has survived because everything else was built around it: keyboards, shortcuts, typing courses, exams and muscle memory. Its weaknesses are real — the most common English letters (E, T, A, O, I, N) are scattered, and the home row carries only about a third of typing — but they matter less than you might expect.

The world’s fastest typists overwhelmingly use QWERTY. Sustained speeds of 150+ WPM are routinely achieved on it, which tells you the layout is not the ceiling for anyone reading this.

Dvorak: the classic alternative

August Dvorak placed all five vowels under the left hand’s home row and the most common consonants under the right, so that typing alternates between hands as often as possible. Alternation is comfortable: one hand gets ready while the other strikes.

Dvorak has one famous champion — Barbara Blackburn, long cited as the fastest English typist — but the controlled evidence for a large speed benefit is thin. The early studies showing big gains were run by Dvorak himself, and later reviews (notably Liebowitz and Margolis’s 1990 paper “The Fable of the Keys”) found the advantage to be small once retraining time was accounted for.

The practical downside is shortcuts. Z, X, C and V move to opposite ends of the keyboard, so copy-and-paste becomes a two-handed stretch unless you use a “Dvorak-QWERTY ⌘” variant that swaps back when a modifier is held.

Colemak: the modern compromise

Colemak reaches home-row use similar to Dvorak’s while moving only 17 keys. The bottom-left row (Z, X, C, V) and most punctuation stay where they are, so shortcuts and symbols keep working. That makes it far easier to switch to, and easier to switch back from when you use someone else’s computer.

A popular variant, Colemak-DH, moves D and H down off the centre columns to reduce awkward sideways reaches. If you are starting from scratch with Colemak, most of its community recommends the DH version.

Will switching make you faster?

Probably not by much, and certainly not soon. Here is what switching realistically looks like:

• Week 1: you drop to 10–20 WPM. Everything you type is slow and deliberate.
• Weeks 2–6: with 20–30 minutes of daily practice, most people climb back to 30–50 WPM.
• Months 2–6: you approach your old QWERTY speed. Some people pass it; many settle a little below or at the same level.

Almost all of the speed people gain from a layout switch comes from the fact that they are forced to learn proper touch typing from scratch. If you currently hunt-and-peck or use four fingers, learning QWERTY touch typing properly will give you the same gain with none of the compatibility cost. Our finger chart is the place to start.

Who should switch

• Consider Colemak if you type for many hours a day, feel finger or hand strain, and mostly use your own computer. Comfort, not speed, is the strongest argument.
• Stay on QWERTY if you need to pass a typing exam or job assessment soon, share computers regularly, or rely heavily on keyboard shortcuts. Government exams such as SSC and RRB are taken on QWERTY machines.
• Dvorak is a fine layout, but for a new switcher in 2026, Colemak or Colemak-DH offers similar comfort with far less disruption.

How to test a layout fairly

Take a few 1-minute tests on QWERTY to set a baseline, then switch your operating system’s input layout and practise daily. Retest weekly with the same test length and difficulty, and judge the layout on accuracy and comfort as much as on WPM.