Beyond QWERTY: Keys to a better layout

History

Back in the olden days, when people used typewriters, they will jam if keys close together are pressed in quick succession. QWERTY is designed to place common bigrams apart from each other, to minimise typewriter jams.

In 2025 (and beyond), we don’t use typewriters anymore, can we find something better than QWERTY? Using modern day metrics, QWERTY performs poorly. Depending on the corpus used, different keyboard layouts may perform differently. One thing is common though, it is that QWERTY is always last.

Quantitative analysis of keyboard layouts

These two (especially the first link) are my favourites to view some statistics about the various alternate keyboard layouts.

To understand what each metric mean, I leave the explanation to the experts: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1W0jhfqJI2ueJ2FNseR4YAFpNfsUM-_FlREHbpNGmC2o/edit?tab=t.diftfwf31kqn

Not the whole story

As much as these metrics are useful, they don’t tell the whole story.

Optimised for English
- May not be optimal for other languages
Doesn’t care about shortcut keys
- Copy and pasting (using ctrl c and ctrl v) is more ergonomic being one-handed shortcut, so that the other hand can be on the mouse. However, on alt layouts, ctrl c and ctrl v might become two handed shortcuts,

The learning process

This process feels terrible, no amount of words I write is sufficient to describe the pain. There’s broadly three phases when learning a keyboard layout: memorising the keys, building muscle memory, fully committing to the new layout.

Phase 1: Memorising the keys

Mentally partition each row
- Learn the keys row by row, leaving time gap in-between
I realise this gets easier the more alt layouts I learn.

Phase 2: Building muscle memory

Once you memorise all the keys, it’s time to build some muscle memory. The typing process is also going to be pain, but just keep repeating this cycle for the next 3-4 months and you’ll see your typing speed increase.

Think of which key you want press
Remember where the keys are
Press the key
Repeat

There’s the usual advice that you should not look down at your keyboard when typing, so that you can be fast. The funny thing in this case is that you have nothing to look at, because the keys are wrong in the first place. I also don’t recommend moving the keys around.

Phase 3: Embracing the new layout

This part differs from people to people. Once you match your qwerty typing speed, you can choose to stop and be happy that you’re as fast in this new alternate keyboard layout. Otherwise, your pain isn’t over yet.

In typing tests, the idea is to just copy the word that is shown on the screen. However, in day to day usage, the mind needs to think of the content, and also at the same time type out the words. Think about it this way, you used 100% of your focus to type 100wpm. Now, you must dedicate close to 100% of the brain to do the thinking, and there’s close to 0% to focus on the typing. The way to overcome this is to jump in cold turkey and use this new layout on a daily basis.

Why would any sane person switch?

If only someone in the wild uses an alt layout, I’ll switch too.
Wanted to use a split keyboard -> Relearn touch typing
I’m not a serial killer

I can type over 100 wpm comfortably on QWERTY, so the thought of switching layouts never occured to me, until that one fateful day. One of my friends commented that if anyone were to experiment with an alt layout, it would be me. And just like that, I fell into the rabbit hole.

At first, I was just learning for fun. I had no plans to give up QWERTY entirely. In fact, I made a personal pact: I’d only switch full-time if I ever met someone IRL who actually used an alt layout. That felt like a safe bet, or so I thought. I got to know someone that uses Dvorak.

Another reason for picking up a new layout was because I knew I wanted to use a split keyboard one day. My habit on QWERTY was to type the letter “y” using my left hand (in proper touch typing, “y” is a right-hand key). Learning a new layout was the perfect excuse to start fresh. Trying to learn proper touch-typing doesn’t make much sense on QWERTY anyway, because the most frequent keys aren’t even on the home row.

And of course, there’s the most important reason of all: to prove I’m not a serial killer. Everyone knows serial killers use QWERTY. I don’t. Therefore, I’m innocent. Not that anyone asked, but it gives me peace of mind.

What I’ve tried

After committing the decision to learn a keyboard layout, the next question would be, which layout? There are so many keyboard layouts out there to try. Here are the keyboard layouts I’ve experimented in chronological order:

Dvorak (& Variants)
1. Standard Dvorak
2. Programmer’s Dvorak
Colemak (& Variants)
1. Standard Colemak
2. Colemak DH
3. Colemak CAW
Gallium (currently still struggling)

Dvorak took me the longest to learn, probably because it’s the first time I’ve used anything outside QWERTY. I took around 3 months to get comfortable with Dvorak (40-50 wpm), and another 3-4 months getting up to 100 wpm. However, for the rest of the keyboard layouts, it only takes me 3-4 months to get from 0 to 100 wpm. If the switch is between variants of the same keyboard family, it is generally easier and takes even lesser time.

Review of the layouts

It should be taken for granted that typing on all the layouts felt very comfortable.

I started my journey with Dvorak, The comma, dot and quote keys are placed in very comfortable positions. The Vim experience was good. However, the CLI experience, wasn’t the best. There were two major frustrations with this layout. Firstly, typing ls -l is a pain. Secontly, keyboard shortcuts are a pain. ctrl c and ctrl v becomes a two-handed shortcut, making copy pasting from webpages feel awkward.

Programmer’s Dvorak made it easier to type symbols by swapping the number row and symbols. The numbers were also rearranged. It doesn’t solve the issues I had with Dvorak.

NOTE

I’ve done some research but it doesn’t fully answer my doubts. Benford’s Law states smaller numbers tend to appear more frequently. This is why Programmer’s Dvorak places the smallest numbers closest to the middle. This is consistent, except that the number 9 is also in the middle. The reason I’ve heard for this is that most people had to type years (such as 19XX), that’s why the number 9 has such a high frequency. Since we’re in the 21st century, I don’t think we need to type the number 9 that frequently to me.

The odd-even sequence doesn’t make sense to me unless there’s research showing that most numbers alternate between even and odd number.

Colemak was similar to QWERTY, in the sense that most of the keys are still on the same side of the keyboard, except maybe 1 or 2 keys. This makes shortcuts easy to press. The keys might have shifted positions, but one-handed shortcuts remain one-handed.

NOTE

A common complaint about using Vim on colemak is that the “h”, “j”, “k”, and “l” positions are all meant for the index finger, and in hard-to-reach positions. I think it’s inevitable because for keys such as “j” or “k”, it doesn’t appear that often in English. That being said, I don’t find this a problem because I don’t use the “h”, “j”, “k”, “l” that much.

Colemak DH is a variant of Colemak, by switching the positions of some keys. It is a combination of 2 mods: the curl and angle mod. Curl mod favours curls over lateral stretches, making it more comfortable to type words such as “the”. The angle mod is mainly targetted at staggered boards, to make it more comfortable typing keys on the bottom row.

Finally, there’s Colemak DH Wide introduces greater separation between the left and right hand, by moving keys on the right-hand side one space to the right. Colemak DH Wide makes it more comfortable to type arr[i] (imo). Also, my hands can be a bit further apart which is a good feeling.

Maintaining friendship with QWERTY

Occasionally, I’ll still have to use a QWERTY keyboard, such as practical exams using school computer (which is in QWERTY btw), or using other people’s computer. Inevitably, after learning an alt layout, your QWERTY typing speed will decrease. However, it can easily be re-learned. As of now, I type around 80 wpm on QWERTY now which is good enough for me.

I do have a few tips that help me switch between QWERTY and an alt layout. The most effective way is to use different physical keyboards for each layout. However, if you do not have the capability to have two different physical keyboards, like me, here are the other ideas that I adopt. Firstly, I have a different resting position on QWERTY. Due to the key frequencies, it makes sense to put the left hand on “aser”, and the right hand on “niop”. Secondly, I use my left thumb for space on the alt layout, and right thumb for space on QWERTY. Despite these efforts to separate the muscle memory, sometimes I still confuse the layouts. I might be typing in QWERTY and reach for a Colemak key.

Is Gallium the endgame, what else is next?

Currently, I’m learning Gallium. Learning a new layout is painful, hopefully Galliuum will be where I end my keyboard layout journey. I would probably keep learning new layouts for fun, but I don’t think it’ll take over as my daily driver.