You're still typing on a typewriter

QWERTY was developed alongside the commercial release of typewriters in the 1870s. Alternative keyboard layouts put the most common letters on the home row, cut finger travel, and spread the work across both hands.

qwertyuiop[]asdfghjkl;'zxcvbnm,./QWERTY=-"#?

red legends mark keys that moved from their QWERTY spot

Visualizer

Watch the same quote typed on two layouts side by side.

watch →

Sampler

Feel a layout under your own fingers — press the keys where each letter would live, no OS remap needed.

try a layout →

A brief history

1878
Christopher Sholes patents for his typewriter. Was aranged to help telegragh operators who transcribed Morse code.
1936
August patents the first well-known alternative, putting vowels and top consonants on the home row: a layout designed around the hand instead of the machine.
1970s–2000s
Typewriters give way to computers, but persists — a century of touch-typing habit turns out to be hard to unlearn
2006–today
kicks off a wave of community-designed layouts — built with corpus analysis and refined in public by the people who actually type on them.