Dvorak and Colemak Compared With QWERTY
Colemak changes the position of 17 keys compared with QWERTY, while the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard, patented by August Dvorak and William Dealey in 1936, rearranges almost the entire letter block. That single difference in scope explains most of what separates the two layouts in daily use, including how long each one takes to learn.
What each layout puts under your fingers
The home row is the whole argument. On QWERTY it reads A S D F G H J K L, and only three of the eight most frequent English letters are on it.
Dvorak puts all five vowels on the left half of the home row, in the order A O E U I, and the consonants D H T N S on the right. Alternating between hands becomes the default motion for most English words, because vowels and consonants alternate.
Colemak reads A R S T D H N E I O across the home row. E sits under the right index finger, which is the most used letter in English placed on the strongest available finger. Z, X, C and V stay exactly where QWERTY leaves them, which keeps the common cut, copy and paste shortcuts in the muscle memory you already have.
The drawing that belongs here
A diagram would carry this faster than prose, so here is what it needs to show. Three stacked blocks of thirty keys, one per layout, in the order QWERTY, Colemak, Dvorak, each drawn as three rows of ten with the home row tinted. In the Colemak block, the thirteen keys that hold their QWERTY position stay grey and the 17 that move are coloured, with a bracket under Z X C V labelled as unchanged. In the Dvorak block almost every key is coloured, and the five left home row vowels carry one shared label. A short arrow from the QWERTY E to the Colemak E and to the Dvorak E shows the same letter landing in three different places. No finger colouring, no travel statistics, because the point of the picture is scope of change.
What the switch actually costs
Both layouts ship with Windows, macOS and Linux, so no extra software is involved and the change is a settings change. The cost is in your hands, not on the disk.
Expect several weeks during which your typing is slower than it was, and expect the dip to be deeper with Dvorak than with Colemak, since more keys move. Expect keycap legends to be wrong unless you buy or relabel them, which many switchers treat as an advantage because it stops them looking down. Expect trouble on machines that are not yours, in remote sessions, and in software with shortcut sequences built around the QWERTY grid.
The claim that either layout makes people faster is where the evidence thins out. Finger travel distance is measurable and both alternatives reduce it. Speed is a different quantity, it depends on the typist far more than on the arrangement, and the strongest numbers in circulation come from advocates rather than from independent measurement. Reduced travel is a comfort argument that can be made honestly. A promise of higher speed cannot.
When to leave QWERTY alone
If you do not touch type yet, learn the keyboard in front of you first. Relearning once is cheaper than relearning twice, and the technique described in learn touch typing is what produces the gain, not the letter order. The same applies if your discomfort comes from posture or from a bad desk height, which no layout can fix.
If you administer other people's computers, sit at shared machines, or work in software with dense keyboard shortcuts, the friction never fully goes away. If you type in more than one language, check first whether your second language even has a Dvorak or Colemak variant with the accented characters you need, because the diacritic route may still send you back through US International.
One practical note about this site: our keyboard test draws five layouts today, ANSI US, ISO German QWERTZ, French AZERTY, US International and Polish programmer, and neither Dvorak nor Colemak is among them. If you have already switched, the tester still reports every keypress correctly, because it reads the physical key position, but the picture on screen will show the QWERTY legends. Changing the layout in your system settings is covered in changing the keyboard layout in Windows.
Before you decide, take a measurement on the layout you have. William Wordsworth printed I wandered lonely as a Cloud in 1807, and its 412 characters are built almost entirely from short common words, which makes it the calmest way to find out whether your hands are limited by the letter order or by something a week of steady practice would settle. Washington Irving opened The Sketch Book of 1820 by saying he was always fond of visiting new scenes, and those 435 characters suit being typed twice, once on each arrangement. Alfred Tennyson published The Brook in 1855, and its 482 characters repeat short verbs in pairs, so an even tempo stays audible even while the letters are still moving house. All three are waiting in the typing test, each with its author, year and source on its own page.