The question comes up roughly once a quarter in every typing community: would I be faster on Dvorak or Colemak? The answer for almost everyone reading this is no, you would not, and the reason has nothing to do with the layouts themselves.
But the long answer is more interesting than the short one. Let's get into it.
The three layouts, briefly
QWERTY
Designed by Christopher Sholes in the 1870s for early typewriters. The story you've heard — that the keys were arranged to slow typists down to prevent jams — is partially true but oversimplified. Sholes actually arranged common letter pairs (like "TH" and "HE") to use opposite hands or distant keys specifically to reduce typebar collisions. He wasn't trying to slow people down; he was trying to make them not jam the machine, which is a different problem.
Once QWERTY became the default on typewriters, it stayed there. Every typist learned it, every manufacturer shipped it, and by the time computers came around the layout was locked in by sheer momentum. Modern English typing on QWERTY uses your weakest fingers (pinky and ring) for some of the most common letters and rolls a lot of motion through the top row instead of the home row.
Dvorak
Designed by August Dvorak in the 1930s based on letter-frequency analysis. The home row holds AOEUIDHTNS — five vowels on the left, the most common consonants on the right. Common English bigrams (TH, HE, IN, ER) become same-hand rolls that minimize finger travel. On paper, Dvorak is dramatically more efficient than QWERTY for English prose.
In practice, the speed advantage in real-world typing is around 4% for skilled typists, sometimes less. The "Dvorak is 70% faster" claim that floats around comes from one mid-century Navy study with serious methodological issues; later, controlled studies put the actual advantage closer to a single-digit percent.
Colemak
Designed by Shai Coleman in 2006 as a more pragmatic alternative. Colemak keeps 17 keys in the same place as QWERTY (including ZXCV, the cut/copy/paste row) and only moves the keys that matter most for English frequency. The result is a layout that's nearly as efficient as Dvorak but takes meaningfully less time to learn and doesn't break muscle memory for keyboard shortcuts.
For most people who do decide to switch, Colemak is the better choice. It's the layout that almost every layout-switching enthusiast settles on once the novelty of Dvorak wears off.
What "efficiency" actually means
The benchmark for evaluating a layout is total finger travel for a representative corpus of English text. Dvorak and Colemak reduce finger travel by around 30–50% compared to QWERTY, depending on the corpus. On paper, that's enormous.
The catch is that finger travel is not the bottleneck for fast typists. A 100 WPM typist's fingers are already moving short distances — the limit isn't motion, it's the speed of motor execution and the eye-finger lookahead. So a 50% reduction in travel doesn't translate to a 50% speed boost. It translates to a modest improvement in fatigue, a small reduction in error rate, and a marginal increase in WPM.
The real cost of switching
Switching layouts is expensive in ways that are hard to appreciate until you're in the middle of it. You will:
- Lose 60–80% of your typing speed in the first week. You will type at ~20 WPM. Email, code, chat — all painful.
- Need ~3 months of consistent practice to return to your old WPM. Hours of deliberate work, not casual exposure.
- Need 6–12 months to exceed your previous QWERTY peak by a meaningful margin.
- Lose your QWERTY muscle memory partially. You can rebuild it (most layout-switchers can dual-wield) but your QWERTY speed will be 10–20% slower than it used to be.
- Hit constant friction on other people's keyboards, public computers, airport kiosks, and most software where keyboard shortcuts are layout-dependent.
The honest accounting: you pay months of slow typing and persistent friction for a 5% long-term WPM gain. If you type for a living and value the gain over decades, this can pencil out. If you don't, it won't.
The single question that decides it
Are your hands hurting?
If yes — if you have RSI, carpal tunnel symptoms, or end every day with tired forearms — Dvorak or Colemak is a real consideration. The reduced finger travel does meaningfully lower fatigue, and the home-row-heavy patterns are gentler on the hands. The 5% speed gain is a side effect; the real reason to switch is comfort. Pair the layout change with ergonomic improvements (proper wrist position, split keyboard, breaks) and the combination can resolve mild RSI in months.
If no — if you type without pain and your speed plateau is somewhere you can live with — the cost-benefit doesn't favor switching. Spend the same months on accuracy work and lookahead training and you'll get a bigger WPM gain on QWERTY than you would from the layout change alone.
"But I want to learn it for the discipline / curiosity / aesthetic"
Then learn it. We won't talk you out of a project you'd enjoy. Just go in with eyes open: this is a 6-month commitment to get back to where you started, and the speed advantage afterward is real but small. Approach it as a learning experience, not as a speed hack.
If you do decide to switch:
- Pick Colemak unless you have a specific reason for Dvorak. The shortcut compatibility alone is worth it.
- Use Colemak-DH (a 2019 mod) if you're starting fresh. It moves D and H to better positions and is the de-facto modern variant.
- Don't dual-learn. Commit to the new layout for the duration of the relearning period. Switching back and forth slows both.
- Use a dedicated trainer like keybr.com to build the muscle memory key-by-key. Don't dive straight into prose; you'll cement bad habits.
- Print stickers or buy a layout-printed keycap set. Looking at the keyboard during relearning is normal and necessary for the first month.
What about Workman, Norman, Halmak, etc.?
There are dozens of alternative layouts. Workman emphasizes lateral finger motion over rolls. Norman tries to be a friendlier QWERTY-to-alternative bridge. Halmak optimizes for hand alternation. Several are genuinely interesting projects.
For typing speed, the differences between them and Colemak are within noise. None has been shown to produce dramatically better outcomes for skilled typists. They exist mostly because layout design is a fun rabbit hole and individual hand preferences vary. If one of them sparks your curiosity, the relearning cost is the same as any other switch — go in for the journey, not the destination.
The boring conclusion
QWERTY is a suboptimal layout that survives because of network effects. The alternatives are genuinely better on paper. The practical gain from switching is small for most people, the cost is real, and the decision should rest on whether your hands are hurting rather than on theoretical efficiency.
If you're chasing speed: focus on accuracy, lookahead, and consistent practice on QWERTY. You'll go further than any layout swap will take you. If you're chasing comfort: a layout switch is one piece of a larger ergonomic project that's worth doing properly.
If you're just curious: that's reason enough. Have fun. Come back in six months and let us know how it went.