Dvorak typing test

The layout in one table

August Dvorak and William Dealey patented their layout in 1936 (US patent 2,040,248). The idea was to put the letters English uses most under the resting fingers. All five vowels sit under the left hand on the home row, and the most common consonants under the right.

Only two letter keys keep their place: A and M. Almost everything else moves, including punctuation. The apostrophe, comma and period take over the top-left corner where QWERTY has Q, W and E. The Workman layout's designer counts 31 characters that differ from QWERTY on Dvorak, against 17 keys for Colemak.

That's the main reason Dvorak is harder to pick up than the newer layouts: you relearn punctuation as well as letters.

Emulation on this page

With emulation on, the test ignores the letter your system produces and looks at the key's physical position instead. Press the key that says D on your keycaps and the test receives E. Your computer stays on QWERTY the whole time.

Already running Dvorak in your OS? Every major operating system includes it, and iOS added it in 2022. That's fine here: emulation reads positions, not the letters your system produces, so you get the same Dvorak characters. Only a keyboard that remaps keys in its own firmware would be translated twice.

The shortcut problem, and why emulation helps

The usual complaint about Dvorak is keyboard shortcuts. On Dvorak, the letters for undo, cut, copy and paste end up scattered: Z on the QWERTY slash key, X on B, C on I and V on the period key. Ctrl+C becomes a two-handed reach.

Because this test emulates the layout only inside the typing area, your shortcuts everywhere else stay where they were while you learn. If you switch fully, check what your system offers: macOS, for instance, has a "Dvorak - QWERTY ⌘" layout that changes to QWERTY while you hold the Command key, so shortcuts stay where your hand expects them.

Is Dvorak faster than QWERTY?

The evidence is thinner than the reputation. Dvorak's early work claimed that students in Tacoma learned his layout in a third of the time QWERTY took. A 1956 study for the US General Services Administration by Earle Strong found Dvorak no more efficient than QWERTY, and later reviews by Stan Liebowitz and Stephen Margolis concluded that the best-documented experiments show little or no advantage. ANSI did list Dvorak as an alternative standard layout in 1982, but that recognition was about availability and says nothing about speed.

The stronger case for Dvorak is comfort. Apple's own help page describes it as cutting down on hand and finger movement, because the most commonly used keys sit under your fingers. If you're thinking about switching, measure what matters to you: take a median of three 1-minute tests on QWERTY now, write it down, and compare in a few months. The longer version of the argument is in QWERTY vs Colemak vs Dvorak.

Learning Dvorak: what to practice first

Start with the home row. On Dvorak it holds every vowel and the five consonants D H T N S, and you can type a lot of real words with those ten letters alone: the, and, this, that, into, out, said, has, does, then, those. Every letter in each of those words sits on the Dvorak home row. Spend the first sessions there with the keymap visible, and try saying each word as you type it.

Then add the top row, punctuation included. The apostrophe, comma and period on the top left are where QWERTY habits fight hardest, because your left hand has been typing Q, W and E there for years. Expect those three keys to dominate your most-missed keys list for a while. The punctuation typing test works with emulation too once you choose Dvorak in the layout settings, and it's a good way to drill them once the letters feel settled.

Keep sessions short. Ten-word or 25-word tests let you stop the moment accuracy drops, which beats grinding through tired errors. When your error rate falls below about 5%, move to timed tests and start tracking speed. Practice uses your own missed keys to build drills, which on Dvorak means it'll find out quickly which old QWERTY reflexes are still firing.