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What thought process went in to each layout? Which typist was considered when putting the keys in their particular spots on the keyboard??

  • QWERTY
  • QWERTZ
  • AZERTY
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  • I think its just user preference. Let me Google , I will come back if I find anything advantageous
    – subanki
    Sep 12, 2010 at 17:46
  • Dvork is another name for Qwertz or Awerty or is it totally different
    – subanki
    Sep 12, 2010 at 18:07
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    This question is like asking what the advantage is in speaking French instead of German.
    – paradroid
    Sep 12, 2010 at 18:12
  • @jason true but it is more like asking advantage of speaking English (US) instead of English (UK). Besides his question made me wonder a lot
    – subanki
    Sep 12, 2010 at 18:14
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    Despite this question being closed as "subjective," it's not at all subjective. Different languages have different character sets. The standard US English (QWERTY) cannot accommodate most other languages because their alphabets consist of more than just the letters A-Z. The keyboard you use (as asked in the original question) will (generally) be determined by your native language. Had the question been "Which is better, QWERTY or Dvorak," that would have been subjective.
    – BillP3rd
    Sep 12, 2010 at 23:58

5 Answers 5

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These layouts are language dependent and based on the relative letter frequencies:

QWERTY - English
QWERTZ - German
AZERTY - French

The reasons for using these other keyboard layouts is that the letters unique to those languages are present as keys on the keyboard rather than having to be accessed via codes or the character map program.

Though the French have proposed standardising on QWERTY:

in 1976, a QWERTY layout adapted to the French language was put forward as an experimental standard (NF XP E55-060) by AFNOR

[From the AZERTY page on Wikipedia]

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    QWERTY was originally designed to reduce jams in typewriters, not for modern computer keyboards and speed of typing. Dvorak layout was focused on reducing the amount of movement needed to type on modern computer keyboards. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY#History_and_purposes
    – Garrett
    Sep 12, 2010 at 21:29
  • Another layout not yet mentioned, is the NEO (neo-layout.org) layout. I think it was intended for the german language, but is quite usable for programming (from one of my colleagues perspective at least).
    – MaoPU
    Sep 12, 2010 at 22:10
  • Despite this question being closed as "subjective," it's not at all subjective. Different languages have different character sets. The standard US English (QWERTY) cannot accommodate most other languages because their alphabets consist of more than just the letters A-Z. The keyboard you use (as asked in the original question) will (generally) be determined by your native language. Had the question been "Which is better, QWERTY or Dvorak," that would have been subjective.
    – BillP3rd
    Sep 12, 2010 at 23:57
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It depends on what you used and learned first. That will be the best for you. Keyboard Layouts are all in their own way "the best". DVORAK for example is developed to reduce muscle fatigue by arranging the keys in a way they are most used. Maybe you should read this Wiki article about Keyboardlayouts to choose whichone is the best for you.

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    And: what is used in your neighbourhood. Like if I was working in Belgium I could, of course, use QWERTY at home and maybe even on my work computer. But I would then still find AZERTY settings (and labels) on the computers of my coworkers or in internet cafes, hence I might want to learn using AZERTY after all.
    – Arjan
    Sep 12, 2010 at 17:53
  • I used to work with QWERTZ since I am in Germany... but becaus of french coworkers I needed to learn DVORAK as well ;-)
    – Diskilla
    Sep 12, 2010 at 17:56
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    Why do you say that? I've lived in france for ... a rather longish time; they use qwertz/y just like everyone else.
    – Rook
    Sep 12, 2010 at 18:00
  • Yes but they also use DVORAK. We´ve got 2 french cowerkers and they both use DVORKA because they learned it this way in school. I don´t know why but because of them I learned DVORAK too. That´s all I wanted to say. Not that all of france use DVORAK.
    – Diskilla
    Sep 12, 2010 at 18:25
  • They probably have every other as well. That doesn't mean you have to learn it for some reason.
    – Rook
    Sep 12, 2010 at 19:12
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OK as I said earlier , its just User Preferences but some notable points are

Advantage of QWERTY would be

  • characters {, }, [, ], \ are reachable from the right hand

Disadvantage of QWERTY would be

  • You cannot type these characters ä, ö, ü, and ß
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    QWERTY keyboard layout was designed to reduce jamming in typewriters by placing the generally used successive keystrokes on opposite sides.
    – subanki
    Sep 12, 2010 at 18:04
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One of the points which hasn't been considered in other answers is what the typist is typing. Some keyboards are better suited for some types of text.

In my country, we use QWERTZ (we just took german layout, removed umlauts and replaced them with our own specific letters) and ЉЊЕРТЗ keyboards and they are much more difficult to use when programming compared to QWERTY. On QWERTZ keyboards many keys often used in programming are tertiary functions of a button. That means that you have to press Alt Gr every time you want to type [] {} | @ \ and similar. That is a big problem when programming because such characters are used very often in programming languages.

On the other hand QWERTZ and AZERTY (Sorry, I never heard of AWERTY layout, so I can't comment on it.) are easier when typing texts. They often have characters such as ¼ (1/4) and other commonly used fractions, accent marks which can be used to create letters with diacritics, have a real dash (―), have old style division mark [it's name is obelus, plural obeli, you learn something new every day!] (÷), cross product mark (×), Numero sign (№) and other special use characters.

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It is like religion. Some will say - this ... and swear on it, some will say - none whatsoever.

You can also find the ones using Dvorak or Colemak. They're a story of their own. For me, QWERTZ, but only because most keyboard in this part of the world are like that. If suddenly some other form came about, I'd start using that one.

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    I doubt that. One could say Dvorak versus QWERTY is like a religion. But QWERTY, AWERTY, QWERTZ and so on are really regional choices.
    – Arjan
    Sep 12, 2010 at 18:02
  • @Arjan - Yeah, maybe there is a less difference in views between those three, and the others, but still, people fight over the most insignificant of things. I still wonder why this question hasn't been closed as being subjective and argumentative.
    – Rook
    Sep 12, 2010 at 18:05

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