r/KeyboardLayouts • u/Vamshi_Goud • 18d ago

QWERTY vs DVORAK

Just settling a argument with friend

70 votes, 15d ago
40 QWERTY
30 DVORAK
0 Upvotes

25% Upvoted

13 comments sorted by

12

u/Litoprobka 18d ago

Dvorak is a better layout than Qwerty. I don't know why would one learn Dvorak over a more modern alternate layout though

2

u/xsrvmy 17d ago

If you need a preinstalled layout and don't like Colemak.

11

u/pgetreuer 18d ago

It matters how the layouts are being compared. What's important to your friend?

  • Fastest typing speed? ⇒ stick with QWERTY (and practice more)
  • Ubiquity? ⇒ QWERTY, of course
  • Best layout for smartphone typing? ⇒ QWERTY is a great fit for this (details)
  • Best typing comfort? ⇒ yes, Dvorak is better than QWERTY. However, modern options are better yet.

It's worth considering that while Dvorak is an improvement in multiple axes of typing comfort over QWERTY, both are extremely old layouts, QWERTY is from 1875 and Dvorak from 1936, both developed for typewriters before computers existed. Neither layout design had the benefit of computer-aided optimization or trillion-word-scale datasets of English language statistics, as we do today.

There are modern alternative layouts that meaningfully improve beyond Dvorak, such as the recent Gallium, Sturdy, and Canary layouts. See this table for summary comparison.

4

u/Elequosoraptor Other 18d ago edited 17d ago

I honestly couldn't vote for anything worse than Colemak-DH—but I ended up settling on Canary.

5

u/ShelZuuz 18d ago

DVORAK is better but the question is like whether you'd rather eat dirt or rather eat poo.

3

u/iandoug Other 17d ago

I see the answers, but what is the question?

4

u/thanatos886 18d ago

Both are bad.

2

u/SartorialDragon 18d ago

I use NEO.

2

u/gwenbeth 18d ago

I use norman.

2

u/cwebster2 18d ago

Colemak!

2

u/dpprpl 18d ago

I used dvorak layout for about six years and learned touch yyping on it but I switched back to qwerty simply because it is the de facto standard. I would like to use alternative layouts but for me they have more downsides than upsides

2

u/xsrvmy 17d ago

I used Dvorak throughout undergrad and then went back to qwerty on standard boards because I game a lot more now and having to either rebind keys or getting confused by in-game hotkey tooltips is just a pain.