Dvorak keyboard layout

The Dvorak layout key by key, with the finger for each key, how to switch your computer to it, and free lessons that teach it from the home row.

Start the Dvorak lessons

• Little
• Ring
• Middle
• Index
• Thumbs

The left hand rests on the vowels A O E U and the right on H T N S, with I and D in the middle columns, so most words pass back and forth between your hands. The apostrophe, comma and full stop now sit at the top left, and the shortcut letters C, V, X and Z have all left the bottom-left corner.

Where Dvorak came from

August Dvorak taught education at the University of Washington and spent years studying how typists move and where their mistakes come from. With his brother-in-law, William Dealey, he patented a new arrangement of the keys: US patent 2,040,248, applied for in 1932 and granted on 12 May 1936.

The thinking shows on the chart. The commonest letters sit on the home row and the rarest on the bottom row. Vowels go to the left hand and the busiest consonants to the right, so most syllables pass from hand to hand. Take “the”, the commonest English word: on QWERTY, T and E are up on the top row, while on Dvorak all three letters are on the home row. Over ordinary English text, about 70% of letters fall on Dvorak's home row, against about a third on QWERTY.

What moves

Nearly everything. Only A and M stay on their QWERTY keys, against ten letters on Colemak. The apostrophe, comma and full stop take the top-left corner, the semicolon drops to the bottom-left one and the hyphen ends the home row. Charts with the digits out of order show Dvorak's original typewriter version, often called classic Dvorak; the standard computer version keeps them in order.

Is it faster?

The evidence is old and disputed. Dvorak's own studies, including one he supervised for the US Navy in 1944, reported large gains. A 1956 study for the US General Services Administration retrained experienced typists on Dvorak and found they did no better than typists given extra training on QWERTY instead. A 1982 simulation of expert typing by Donald Norman and Diane Fisher found that where the keys sit makes little difference. In 1990 the economists Stan Liebowitz and Stephen Margolis called the case for Dvorak weak in “The Fable of the Keys”; his supporters still dispute them. If you switch, do it because the layout feels better under your fingers, and treat any gain in speed as a bonus.

Shortcuts

Ctrl+Z, X, C and V follow their letters, and Dvorak scatters them: C is on the key QWERTY calls I, V on the full stop, X on B and Z on the slash. On a Mac, the input source Dvorak - QWERTY ⌘ types Dvorak but turns into QWERTY while you hold Command, so Command+C stays put. Windows has no built-in equivalent.

Some programs, games especially, read the physical key rather than the letter, so their shortcuts stay in QWERTY positions whatever layout you use.

Switching your computer to Dvorak

Every major system includes Dvorak, so there is nothing to download.

The first weeks

Expect to be slow. In the 1956 study, typists who already typed well needed weeks of daily practice to get back to their QWERTY speed. Start in a quiet week, practise for fifteen minutes every day rather than for hours at the weekend, and put accuracy first, because a mistake you repeat now becomes a habit. Leave the QWERTY keycaps as they are: they can't help you, so you stop looking at them.

Practising Dvorak on CamelKeys

CamelKeys does not remap keys. Switch your computer to Dvorak, then choose Dvorak under Keyboard layout in Settings, or use the button on this page, which opens the lessons with Dvorak already chosen. The lessons, the keyboard drawn under each test and the finger counts in your results then follow Dvorak.

The 26 lessons take the same path as on QWERTY. The first is U and H under your index fingers, and the second adds E and T, so you can type “the” after two lessons. Five lessons give you the whole home row and words like “that”, “this” and “into”; a QWERTY learner at the same point is typing “flask” and “salad”. Tests are the usual ones, in any language, such as the 1-minute test. If a lesson fills with errors from the first key, check your computer's layout: CamelKeys sees whatever letters your computer sends.

Sources

• A. Dvorak and W. L. Dealey, US patent 2,040,248, “Typewriter keyboard”, 1936.
• E. P. Strong, “A Comparative Experiment in Simplified Keyboard Retraining and Standard Keyboard Supplementary Training”, US General Services Administration, 1956.
• D. A. Norman and D. Fisher, “Why Alphabetic Keyboards Are Not Easy to Use: Keyboard Layout Doesn't Much Matter”, Human Factors, 1982.
• S. J. Liebowitz and S. E. Margolis, “The Fable of the Keys”, Journal of Law and Economics, 1990.
• P. Norvig, “English Letter Frequency Counts: Mayzner Revisited”.
• Microsoft, “Windows keyboard layouts”; Apple, “Use Dvorak keyboard layouts on Mac”; TidBITS on Dvorak in iOS 16, 2022; Google, Chromebook Help and Gboard Help; Android Police on Android 14 keyboards, 2023; xkeyboard-config.