Dvorak vs QWERTY: Is Switching Worth It If You Already Type Fast?

Stick around and I'll walk through where the "Dvorak is faster" claim actually comes from, what happened when someone with no stake in the outcome checked it, and what people who've actually made the switch say once the novelty wears off.

Should You Switch to Dvorak or Colemak If You Already Type Fast?

If you already touch type reasonably well and someone tells you switching layouts will make you faster, the honest answer is: probably not, and the study everyone cites to make that claim has a problem you should know about before you spend a weekend relearning your keyboard.

That doesn't mean switching is pointless. It means the decision should rest on the right reason - and speed usually isn't it.

What Actually Happened in the Famous "Dvorak Is Faster" Study?

Here's the detail that gets left out of most articles like this one: the most-cited evidence for that speed claim comes from a 1944 U.S. Navy study, and August Dvorak - the navy's own time-and-motion specialist at the time, and the inventor who held the patent on the layout - personally designed the experiment, ran it, and reported the results. He claimed the retrained typists reached 74% higher speed than their old QWERTY average, after about 52 hours of training, with accuracy up 68%.

Nobody has ever independently reproduced those numbers. Later review of the study found real problems: the control group - typists who got extra training on QWERTY instead of switching - appears to have received noticeably less attention and coaching than the group learning the new layout, which stacks the comparison before a single word is typed. As one archived academic summary of the affair puts it, "subsequent investigation has shown that at best, the experiments in the Navy study were biased, and at worst, fabricated." Dvorak himself is also documented to have discarded the results of at least two earlier trials - results nobody has ever seen.

A person who patents a keyboard layout and then personally runs the study proving it's better isn't lying by definition. But it's exactly the kind of setup where you'd want a second, independent check before repeating the claim as fact.

What Did the Independent Government Study Actually Find?

That second check happened. In the mid-1950s, the General Services Administration commissioned researcher Earle Strong - who had no patent interest and no connection to Dvorak - to run a properly controlled comparison. The result directly contradicted the 1944 numbers: typists retrained on it "were able to match their previous qwerty speeds, but not surpass them." Extra training time spent on QWERTY produced a bigger speed gain than the same amount of time spent on the new layout.

Economists Stan Liebowitz and Stephen Margolis reviewed this entire history in "The Fable of the Keys" (Journal of Law and Economics, 1990) and didn't mince words in their popular summary of it: "the story of Dvorak's superiority is a myth or, perhaps more properly, a hoax." Government and corporate interest in switching, which had been building through the 1950s, dropped off sharply once the GSA results came out - and in the six years between that paper and their 1996 popular summary, nobody had published a rebuttal of their factual claims.

None of this proves Dvorak or Colemak are bad layouts. It proves the specific claim that they make you faster than QWERTY once you already know how to type doesn't hold up to independent testing.

How Much Speed Do You Really Lose in the First Weeks?

The GSA study didn't publish a week-by-week breakdown, so for that you have to look at what people who've actually switched report today. One frequently cited breakdown, from the keyboard site keebsforall.com: a typist averaging 78 words per minute on QWERTY dropped to around 25 WPM on day one of Colemak and roughly 12 WPM on day one of Dvorak - full recovery then took about 4 to 6 weeks for the first, 8 to 12 for the second.

Individual accounts vary a lot. One developer who documented a full week of switching to Colemak went from 15 WPM on day one to 52 WPM by day seven, later calling his new average speed "good enough for daily life" - though he never states what his original QWERTY speed was, which makes the comparison hard to judge. Another switcher describes two months of practicing alongside QWERTY before fully committing, then another two months before reaching a comfortable baseline - close to five months total. On a forum thread specifically about whether switching is worth it, one typist who tested Dvorak after typing 90+ WPM at 92% accuracy on QWERTY reported dropping to roughly 9 WPM on the first attempt.

There's no single honest number here - the range runs from "about a month" in the more optimistic accounts to five months or more in the more typical ones. What's consistent across almost every account: the first week or two is genuinely rough, no matter which layout you pick.

Is Colemak Actually Easier to Learn Than Dvorak?

This part of the comparison is one of the few claims that holds up cleanly. Colemak was deliberately designed in 2006 as an easier-to-learn alternative, and the specific design choice that makes it easier is concrete: it leaves Z, X, C, and V exactly where QWERTY has them, because those are the letters behind Undo, Cut, Copy, and Paste. Switch to Colemak and your keyboard shortcuts keep working. Switch to Dvorak and most of them don't, because it relocates nearly every letter on the board.

That difference shows up directly in the numbers from the last section: the day-one drop for Colemak was roughly half as steep as the other layout's (78 down to 25, versus 78 down to 12), and the recovery window was roughly half as long. If shortcuts and punctuation placement matter to how you work - which they do for most office and coding tasks - Colemak's smaller footprint of changes is a real, structural reason it's the gentler transition, not just a marketing line.

What Do People Who Actually Switched Say?

Reading enough first-hand accounts, a pattern shows up fast: people who are glad they switched almost never lead with speed. "Dvorak is FAR more comfortable to type on," one longtime user wrote on a keyboard forum. "I didn't switch to Dvorak for the speed, I switched because it's easier on the fingers." Another regular on the same thread put it more simply: "It's a lot easier on the hands, and all of the common keys are on the home row."

The skeptical voices tend to focus on something else entirely: practicality. "If the only computer you use is dvorak, sure, why not," one forum reply put it. "Unfortunately most of earth uses qwerty." That's a real, unglamorous cost that speed comparisons tend to skip - every shared computer, every coworker's desk, every public terminal you sit down at is still QWERTY, and you'll be hunting for keys on it after you switch.

Does Your QWERTY Skill Get Worse After Switching?

This is the trade-off that rarely makes it into "should I switch" articles: learning a new layout doesn't leave your old one untouched. "Whenever I have to type QWERTY - a public computer, or my disk encryption password before my system is booted - it feels as if I first started with Colemak," one developer wrote after several months on the new layout. He still recommended switching overall, but it's an honest cost, not a hypothetical one: if you regularly type on a machine you don't control, that friction is going to show up.

If you want a deeper look at what happens to your speed specifically during any relearning period - not just a layout switch - Is It Too Old to Learn Touch Typing at 40, 50, or 60? covers the same temporary-dip pattern from a different angle.

So Why Do People Still Switch?

Set the speed claim aside and there's a real, structural argument left standing: Dvorak was designed so that a much larger share of common English letters sit right under your resting fingers, on the home row - commonly cited at around 70%, and even higher for Colemak, against roughly a third for QWERTY. Less reaching for common letters is a genuine ergonomic difference, and it's the reason people who switch for hand or wrist comfort tend to stay switched, independent of what happens to their WPM.

It's also worth naming the outlier case honestly: enthusiasts chasing peak typing-competition speed sometimes do end up faster on an alternative layout than they ever were on QWERTY - one account describes going from 60-70 WPM on QWERTY to 100 WPM on Colemak. But that took years of deliberate practice, not weeks, and it's the kind of result competitive typists chase on purpose - not a realistic expectation for someone who just wants their everyday work typing to feel less effortful.

Does TypeBlind Even Support Dvorak and Colemak?

If you do decide the ergonomics are worth it, TypeBlind's practice mode supports training on Dvorak, its programmer variant, and Colemak - including five separate Colemak-DH variants for different keyboard shapes - alongside standard QWERTY. You turn it on from the Practice page: click the Lessons button, then pick your layout under Keyboard settings.

You don't need to relabel your physical keys or switch your operating system's layout to try it. TypeBlind's "Emulate layout" option intercepts your normal QWERTY keystrokes and reinterprets them as the layout you've selected, so you can test-drive either layout on hardware that's still QWERTY underneath. If you already have a hardware layout switcher built into your keyboard, there's a separate option for that case instead.

So Should You Switch? A Simple Way to Decide

The last row matters more than it looks: almost every account in this article comes from someone who already touch typed well on QWERTY before switching. If you're still typing with two or four fingers while looking at the keyboard, that's the thing actually costing you speed and accuracy right now - not your layout.

Common Mistakes People Make When Considering a Layout Switch

Most people treat "Dvorak types faster" as settled fact, when it traces straight back to the person who profited from it. Almost as common: badly underestimating the transition - expecting a few days of adjustment when real accounts describe weeks to months. And for readers of this specific article, who type with two to four fingers while watching the keyboard, the real risk is stacking two learning curves at once - switching layouts before they've learned to touch type at all.

None of that means either layout is a bad choice. It means the decision is about comfort and hand strain, made with clear eyes about the actual cost - not a speed upgrade that the best independent evidence never confirmed.

Before you touch your layout settings at all, the highest-leverage move is the one this whole article points back to: know your own weak keys. Why Fixing Your Weak Keys Beats More Typing Practice covers the targeted fix most people need first, and Why Your Typing Test Score Changes Every Time You Take One explains what a WPM number actually tells you before and after any change.