Workman is the layout for people who felt Colemak didn't go far enough — a 2010 design by OJ Bucao that keeps common letters out of the keyboard's stretch-prone center columns and favors each finger's natural up-and-down arc. Below is the full arrangement with every moved key highlighted, plus the critique of Colemak that created it.
Highlighted keys sit in different positions than on US QWERTY — 21 in all, confined to the letter block. Set it beside Colemak and the philosophy jumps out: H lands on the left home row under the middle finger and D moves up to the top row, so neither of those frequent letters sits in the lateral center columns. The number row, brackets, and Z and X stay put — but note that C and V each drift one key to the right, taking the copy and paste shortcuts with them.
Workman exists because of a sore wrist. OJ Bucao, a programmer and designer battling typing strain, switched from QWERTY to Colemak and noticed a new discomfort: Colemak parks D and H — two of English's most frequent letters, and halves of the digraphs 'th', 'he' and 'ed' — in the keyboard's center columns, which the index fingers can only reach by stretching sideways. His 2010 essay on the Workman philosophy turned that observation into a design principle: fingers travel up and down along their natural arc far more comfortably than they splay laterally, so a layout should spend its best vertical positions on common letters and reserve the center columns for rare ones.
The resulting layout grades every key position by how comfortable it actually is for the finger that owns it — accounting for the longer reach of the middle and ring fingers and the downward curl of the index — and then matches letter frequency to comfort. H moves onto the left home row, D to the top row, and the vowels O and I complete the right home row. The payoff shows on the commonest English word: on Workman, 'the' is typed entirely on the home row, rolling from left index to left middle to right middle. Analyzer tools generally confirm the trade Bucao intended — total finger travel well below QWERTY's and lateral index strain below Colemak's — at the cost of somewhat more same-finger sequences, the famous example being 'ly', whose two letters share the right index finger.
Workman moves 21 keys from QWERTY, a step more radical than Colemak's 17 but far short of Dvorak's wholesale rearrangement, and it deliberately keeps Z and X — undo and cut — in place, though C and V shift one key right. It never reached Colemak's popularity, and it has no corporate or OS backing beyond inclusion in Linux's XKB database, but it retains a devoted following among RSI-conscious typists. Its sharpest legacy may be indirect: the center-column critique Workman made in 2010 was compelling enough that the Colemak community eventually adopted it themselves, in the form of Colemak-DH.
OJ Bucao published Workman in September 2010, releasing it around the US Labor Day holiday and dedicating it to everyone who works at a keyboard for a living — hence the name. It arrived with an unusually thorough manifesto: rather than simply presenting an arrangement, Bucao's essay attacked the assumption, shared by Dvorak and Colemak alike, that all keys adjacent to the home position are equally cheap, arguing that lateral stretches into the center columns are far more costly than vertical reaches — especially for a design like Colemak that puts D and H there.
The layout spread through the ergonomics and mechanical-keyboard communities rather than any official channel, picking up a place in Linux's XKB database and spawning variants — most notably Workman-P, which flips the number row so programmers get symbols unshifted and digits on Shift. It has remained a niche choice with an unusually loyal user base, and its core argument won a broader victory than the layout itself: the mid-2010s Colemak-DH variant, now the ergonomic community's default Colemak, relocates D and H for precisely the reasons Bucao laid out in 2010.
As a direct answer to Colemak. OJ Bucao, suffering typing strain, found that Colemak places D and H in the keyboard's center columns, forcing the index fingers into constant lateral stretches on two very frequent letters. Workman, released in 2010, rebuilds the layout around the principle that vertical finger travel is cheap and sideways travel is expensive.
Workman moves 21 keys to Colemak's 17 and redistributes the letters so that no high-frequency letter sits in the center columns — H goes to the left home row, D to the top row. The trade-offs: C and V shift one key right (Colemak keeps them put), and Workman accepts more same-finger sequences, like 'ly', in exchange for less lateral strain. Colemak-DH later borrowed Workman's central idea.
It depends on which metric you care about. Workman wins on lateral index-finger movement and posts strong overall finger-travel numbers; Colemak edges it on same-finger sequences and has a vastly larger community; Dvorak maximizes hand alternation and ships in every OS. All three are large paper improvements over QWERTY, and honest comparisons find comfort differences between them are smaller than the leap from QWERTY to any of them.
Not currently — the site's on-screen keyboards cover language layouts, and there is no Workman input page. To try it, enable it at the system level: Linux includes Workman in its keyboard settings, and the Workman project provides free installers for Windows and macOS. Once your OS is switched, the typing speed test linked below tracks your Workman progress, since it measures whatever layout your system produces.
The programmer's variant of Workman. It inverts the number row: brackets, parentheses and other symbols type unshifted, while the digits move to the Shift layer — the same trade AZERTY makes, but aimed at code instead of French. Everything in the letter block is identical to standard Workman, so switching between the two costs nothing.