Every keyboard layout, explained honestly
Should you switch to a different keyboard layout?
For comfort, not speed. The classic study “The Fable of the Keys” (Liebowitz & Margolis) found no reliable speed advantage for Dvorak over QWERTY. The same honesty applies to every layout below. Switch for hand comfort, not a speed windfall, and budget a real adjustment: roughly 8 WPM on day 1, 53 by day 30, parity around day 90.
Latin script
QWERTY (US)
ansiThe default layout almost everyone starts on: the baseline every other layout is measured against.
Read the guide →QWERTY (UK)
isoUS QWERTY's British sibling: same letters, £ instead of #, and an extra ISO key for \|.
Read the guide →AZERTY (France)
isoFrance's national layout: A/Q and Z/W swapped, numbers behind Shift, and accents living on the number row.
Read the guide →QWERTZ (Germany)
isoThe German-speaking world's layout: Z and Y swap, and ä ö ü ß get keys of their own.
Read the guide →Spanish (Spain)
isoSpain's layout: Ñ gets a dedicated key, and áéíóú stay one dead-key tap away.
Read the guide →Colemak
ansiA 2006 QWERTY alternative that keeps Ctrl+Z/X/C/V in place while moving the rest onto stronger fingers.
Read the guide →Colemak-DH
ansiA 2014 community refinement of Colemak that pulls D and H down into the easier-to-reach bottom-row inner columns.
Read the guide →Dvorak
ansiPatented in 1936 to put the most common English letters on the home row under your strongest fingers.
Read the guide →Workman
ansiA 2010 layout that weighs sideways finger movement as heavily as row travel: not just 'how far,' but 'how awkwardly.'
Read the guide →Graphite
ansiA 2022 algorithmically-generated, hand-tuned layout built for high rolls and low same-finger travel, with programmer-friendly punctuation.
Read the guide →Cyrillic script
Russian (ЙЦУКЕН)
ansiThe standard Cyrillic layout used across Russia and much of the former USSR: Ё lives on Backquote, Б/Ю on Comma/Period.
Read the guide →Russian Phonetic (ЯШЕРТЫ)
ansiA sound-alike Cyrillic layout for learners: each Latin key types the Cyrillic letter that sounds like it, so А is A, Б is B, В is V, and so on.
Read the guide →Compare two layouts head to head
How many keys actually move, what the evidence says about speed, and how long switching takes, side by side.
Layouts we do not emulate yet
People arrive here looking for Canary, MTGAP, Nerps and Seniply, and we would rather say so than quietly rank for them. These are community-designed alternative layouts, and Polytaipe does not support them today.
That is a deliberate pace rather than an oversight. Every layout here is defined per physical key and covered by tests that assert it can type its whole alphabet with no duplicated keys, because the failure mode in this category is shipping a map that is subtly wrong and letting people spend weeks learning it. Adding a layout is cheap; verifying one is not, and an unverified layout is worse than a missing one.
If you want one of these, the closest supported starting points are Colemak-DH and Graphite, both of which target the same lateral-stretch problem the newer community layouts are built around.