Why does French use AZERTY? Is Dvorak really faster? What do the letters on a Thai keyboard mean? Visual guides to 10 keyboard layout standards — each with a key diagram, its history, and links to try the layout live in your browser.
A keyboard layout is the arrangement of characters across a keyboard's keys — which letter each physical key produces. The hardware is mostly identical worldwide; what differs is the mapping. QWERTY dominates English-speaking countries, France rearranges six keys and calls it AZERTY, German-speaking Europe swaps Y and Z for QWERTZ, and languages with their own scripts — Russian, Thai, Korean, Hindi — use entirely different national standards designed around their alphabets.
Alongside the national standards live the optimized layouts: Dvorak, Colemak, and Workman rearrange the Latin alphabet to cut finger travel and put the most common letters on the home row. Each guide here shows the actual key arrangement, explains where the design came from, and — for layouts AnyKeyboard supports — links to a live virtual keyboard so you can type on it immediately, no OS settings required.