Colemak is the modern compromise between QWERTY and the ergonomic ideal: it moves just 17 keys, leaves your undo–cut–copy–paste corner alone, and still lands about 74% of English keystrokes on the home row. Below is the full arrangement with each moved key highlighted, where the layout came from, and how it stacks up against Dvorak.
Highlighted keys sit in different positions than on US QWERTY — just 17 of them, all inside the letter block. The number row never changes, A stays home, and the bottom row survives almost intact (only N's key changes, to K), so the Z X C V shortcut corner is untouched. The semicolon gets evicted to QWERTY's P key so that O can finish the home row. One change the diagram cannot show: in the official layout, Caps Lock becomes a second Backspace.
Colemak's founding insight is that Dvorak solved the wrong problem. QWERTY's inefficiency was never the real obstacle to replacing it — the retraining cost was. So when Shai Coleman released his layout on 1 January 2006, he optimized for both at once: near-Dvorak efficiency at a fraction of the switching pain. Only 17 keys move, and they are chosen so the wreckage is minimal — Z, X, C and V stay put for undo, cut, copy and paste, A, Q, W, B, H and M never move, and every bracket, digit and almost all punctuation stays where QWERTY put it. Even the name is a compromise: Coleman plus Dvorak.
The efficiency comes from a beautifully simple move: Colemak's home row — A R S T D H N E I O — is exactly the set of the ten most frequent letters in English (E T A O I N S H R D, rearranged for flow). The result, by the project's own analysis, is about 74% of keystrokes on the home row, more than twice QWERTY's share and slightly ahead of Dvorak, with 2.2 times less total finger travel than QWERTY. The official definition also converts the nearly useless Caps Lock key into a second Backspace, moving the single most-pressed correction key from a pinky stretch to a home-row tap.
Colemak became the internet era's default alternative layout. It ships built into macOS, Linux and ChromeOS (Windows still requires a small third-party install), and its community — forums, trainers, the staged Tarmak transition scheme that migrates you in five gentle steps — dwarfs every rival's. Its known weak point is the D and H placement in the keyboard's center columns, which forces lateral index-finger stretches; the community's Colemak-DH variant fixes exactly that, and on ergonomic and split keyboards DH has effectively become the standard form.
Shai Coleman released Colemak on 1 January 2006 — not through a standards body or a manufacturer, but as a free download announced to online typing communities. The pitch was explicitly pragmatic: Dvorak-class efficiency while keeping QWERTY's shortcuts and most of its keys, so the switching cost that had doomed Dvorak would not apply. It made Colemak arguably the first keyboard layout to succeed purely through the internet.
Adoption followed the open-source route: into the XKB layout database on Linux, then into macOS and ChromeOS, while the community built learning tools — most famously Tarmak, a series of five transitional layouts that move a few keys at a time so you never fall below a usable speed. Within a decade Colemak had overtaken Dvorak as the alternative layout newcomers actually chose.
The most important development since is Colemak-DH, a community refinement from the mid-2010s that relocates D and H off the lateral center columns — answering the layout's best-known criticism from inside the family. Colemak-DH is now the recommended form in much of the ergonomic-keyboard world, and the debate between vanilla Colemak, DH, Workman and newer optimized layouts remains one of the liveliest corners of keyboard culture.
Seventeen keys move, all letters plus the semicolon; the number row, brackets and Z X C V corner stay put. The point of the moves is the home row: Colemak's A R S T D H N E I O are exactly the ten most frequent letters of English, so about 74% of keystrokes land there versus roughly 32% on QWERTY. The official layout also turns Caps Lock into a second Backspace.
For most people coming from QWERTY, Colemak — the transition is far gentler (17 changed keys versus 33, shortcuts intact) and its modern community and tooling are much larger. Dvorak's advantages are maximum hand alternation and native Windows support. On measured efficiency the two are close, and both are a large improvement over QWERTY on paper.
A community variant that fixes vanilla Colemak's most criticized trait: D and H sitting in the center columns, where the index fingers must stretch sideways for two very common letters. Colemak-DH moves them to more comfortable positions (with a couple of knock-on changes), and it has become the default recommendation on ergonomic and split keyboards.
Not currently — the site's on-screen keyboards cover language layouts, and there is no Colemak input page. You do not need one to try it, though: Colemak is built into macOS, Linux and ChromeOS, and Windows users can install it from the official Colemak project. Once your system is switched, the typing speed test linked below measures your Colemak WPM just fine, because it works with whatever layout your OS produces.
Noticeably less than Dvorak, because ten letters and virtually all punctuation stay where QWERTY put them. Expect a few days to learn the positions, two to four weeks of practice to be comfortable, and one to two months to fully match your old speed. If you cannot afford a slow period, the Tarmak transitional layouts introduce the changes in five small steps.