Keyboard Layout Comparison (QWERTY vs Dvorak vs Colemak)
Compare QWERTY, Dvorak and Colemak on finger travel and home-row share, computed from each layout's grid.
What is Keyboard Layouts?
The argument about keyboard layouts is usually conducted with borrowed numbers, so this comparison computes them in front of the reader: each key's distance from its finger's home position, weighted by how often that letter appears in English. It is the honest version of the claim that Dvorak is more efficient — you can see which term produces the difference — and it also makes the limits obvious, which the borrowed numbers never did.
How it works
Travel is measured in key units on a stagger-matched grid, weighted by a published English letter-frequency table, and converted to metres with the standard 19.05 mm key pitch. All three layouts are scored with the same finger-per-column assignment, which is how Dvorak and Colemak were designed and the only way the comparison is like for like. Two limits are stated on the page: the frequency table describes English text rather than code, and travel distance is a proxy for effort that ignores same-finger bigrams, hand alternation and the fact that every shortcut ever written assumes QWERTY.
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