The Qwerty Keyboard Layout Vs The Dvorak Keyboard Layout

Qwerty

Dvorak

This is a tool that compares the efficiency of the Dvorak layout and the standard Qwerty layout.

Check out the results for a few large texts

Shakespeare - all his works (1586-1612), Mark Twain - Roughing It (1872), HG Wells - War of the Worlds (1898), Lester Del Rey - Police Your Planet (1981), C# Language Specification Document (2003), Microsoft Encarta's entry on Africa (2004) , Wikipedia's entry on The Tiger (2008), Top 1000 Words in UK English.

Or see for yourself: Paste some text below to compare the efficiency of the keyboard layouts

Note: You cannot submit more than 50,000 characters (that's about 25 pages).

• The overall effort takes into consideration all test criteria.
• The home characters are a s d f j k l ; : for Qwerty and a o e u h t n s for Dvorak.
• The finger travel distance is computed for a distance between characters of 1.8 cm. Only the horizontal distance is counted.
• Enter (new line), Shift and Space are taken into consideration. Tab is not, so you can test tab-formatted computer code.
• The Alphabetical layout is there as a comparison - think of it as a random layout.
• The Colemak layout is a brand-new (2006) alternative to Dvorak.
• The DDvorak layout (Developer's Dvorak) is my own Dvorak-based layout created for programmers. If you test computer code, you will see some improvement over standard Dvorak.

Alternative layouts FORUM - see what others think about this test and the layouts.

Test results show Dvorak is about 25% more efficient than Qwerty

First of all, let me point out that the results are remarkably consistent. The difference between the values for H.G. Wells's science fiction novel and those for Lester Del Rey's novel written 80 years later is almost always less than 1 percentage. The difference is still less than 2% when comparing it with the modern Encarta Encyclopedia Article.

Qwerty was designed starting from the Alphabetical layout with the aim of spreading the keys around so your typewriter won't jam. So the only reason why the overall score for Qwerty is some 15% better than that of Alphabetical is because it does a better job of ballancing the keys between the fingers.

Dvorak was designed for touch typing. So how much better than Qwerty is Dvorak for touch typing? Turns out, not as much as some Dvorak supporters might have you think. It reduces total finger work by 24%, reduces awkward combinations of characters by around 66%, and does a better job at balancing the characters between fingers and hands by about 20%.

Colemak is quite close to Dvorak. It scores a bit better in some areas and a bit worse in other areas, and its overall score is usually 2-5% better than that of Dvorak, but it is worse for some texts. So it's slightly better than Dvorak, especially if you take into consideration its other advantages (better position for Backspace and similarity to Qwerty).

The main difference between Dvorak and DDvorak is that DDvorak has switched the u and i characters. This accounts for the improvement in finger travel distance and % of home characters.

Considering switching to Dvorak?

The fact is, the Qwerty layout is not very friendly to the touch-typist (touch-typing handn't been invented when QWERTY was created). Switching to the Dvorak layout has helped me type a bit faster and be a lot more comfortable while typing.

It took me two months to regain my Qwerty speed (with about 2 hours of typing / day). The first week was very frustrating, but in the end it was all worth it.

The 24% less effort and 2 months learning time figures mean the average internet user will recoup the 'investment' he made to learn Dvorak in about 6 months.

You can change your layout in minutes (you don't need a new keyboard or any new software!).

Try the Dvorak layout: Spider Contester is a Qwerty to Dvorak converter and speed typing test. Simply select the option 'Convert from Qwerty to Dvorak'.

Considering switching to Colemak?

As I've said, Colemak is slightly better than Dvorak and more similar to Qwerty (thus easier to learn) but you must install it, whereas Dvorak comes with pretty much every operating system. Your choice.

If you're already using Dvorak, switching u and i and moving Backspace to Caps Lock wipes away most of the small advantage Colemak has over Dvorak.

And since we're talking improvements, can you touch-type the bottom left row?