Layouts / Compare
Workman vs Colemak
Workman and Colemak differ on 16 of their 36 letter and punctuation keys, about 44%. Neither has reliable evidence of being faster to type on: the honest reason to prefer one is hand comfort and shortcut habits, not speed. The real cost of switching is the few weeks spent below your old pace.
How different are Workman and Colemak?
Of the 36 letter and punctuation keys the two layouts share a position for, 16 produce a different character, so about 44% of the typing keys move. The number and modifier keys stay put. Here is the home row, the row your fingers rest on, in each:
Is Workman faster than Colemak?
There is no solid evidence that either layout makes you type faster. Controlled comparisons find that practice volume dwarfs layout choice, and the fastest typists in the CHI 2018 study of 136 million keystrokes (Dhakal et al.) win on rollover and rhythm, not on which layout they use. Optimized layouts do measurably cut finger travel and same-finger bigrams, which is a comfort and effort argument, not a speed promise.
How long does switching take?
Real alternative-layout timelines converge on roughly 8 WPM on day 1, about 53 WPM by day 30, and parity with your old speed near day 90 of consistent daily practice. For Workman: Similar to Dvorak: expect several weeks to a couple of months to reach prior QWERTY speed, since most letters relocate. For Colemak: Most people report 2–4 weeks of regular practice to match their old QWERTY speed, with real comfort gains showing up well before that.
Which should you choose?
Workman: Typists who've read the ergonomic argument about lateral stretch and want a layout built specifically around minimizing it, rather than defaulting to the more famous Colemak/Dvorak.
Colemak: QWERTY typists who want a meaningfully lower-effort layout without a full from-scratch relearn, and who don't want to give up their editor/OS shortcut muscle memory.
Workman
A 2010 layout that weighs sideways finger movement as heavily as row travel: not just 'how far,' but 'how awkwardly.'
- Explicitly optimizes for lateral/sideways stretch, not just raw finger-travel distance, a metric many other layouts underweight
- Some independent layout analyzers show it edging out Colemak on total finger-travel distance for English text
- Keeps semicolon on its QWERTY key, unlike Colemak/Dvorak, which some coders find easier on the hands for common syntax
- Much smaller community than Colemak or Dvorak, so tooling, guides, and OS-level support are thinner
- Its central design claim (lateral movement matters more than raw distance) is Workman's own argument, not an independently settled consensus in the layout community
- Like Dvorak, most letters move relative to QWERTY, so shortcuts and existing muscle memory don't transfer
Colemak
A 2006 QWERTY alternative that keeps Ctrl+Z/X/C/V in place while moving the rest onto stronger fingers.
- Roughly halves finger travel distance versus QWERTY by independent analyses, and cuts same-finger bigrams from the thousands to the low hundreds per typical novel-length text
- Z/X/C/V stay put, so undo/cut/copy/paste shortcuts keep working without remapping
- One of the most widely supported alternative layouts, built into most operating systems and every mechanical-keyboard firmware
- Still an angle-mod-free, straight ANSI layout, so the pinky and ring fingers on the outer columns do more reaching than a split/ergo-first design would ask for
- Smaller community and software support than QWERTY, obviously: some games and remote-desktop tools assume QWERTY key positions for shortcuts
- The claimed finger-travel and speed gains are real in aggregate but layout choice matters far less than practice volume for most typists