dvorak
a twenty-lesson course for the dvorak layout, written for dvorak rather than translated from a qwerty one. free, no account, nothing tracked, and your progress stays in this browser.
learn every key
most people settle all 20 lessons in 6–9 hours of practice — a few visits per lesson, never twice in one day.
home rowlessons 1–5
top rowlessons 6–10
bottom rowlessons 11–14
shift & capitalslesson 15
numberslessons 16–18
punctuationlessons 19–20
why the lessons are different
dvorak puts every vowel under your left hand — a o e u on the home row with i a short reach away — and the common consonants under your right: d h t n s. english alternates vowels and consonants, so dvorak alternates hands. that is the whole idea of the layout, and it shapes the course: by lesson five you have all five vowels, which no other course here manages.
the punctuation lands early too, because dvorak does not hide it in the corners. the apostrophe, comma and period take the three leftmost keys of the top row — where qwerty puts q, w and e. so the period arrives in lesson eight, and you are writing properly finished sentences six lessons before the qwerty or colemak courses get there. those two keep the full stop down in the bottom row and do not reach it until lesson fourteen.
one thing dvorak does not win: the size of your early vocabulary. at lesson five it can spell about forty words from our practice bank where colemak manages sixty, because colemak’s home row carries the apostrophe and a denser set of consonants. dvorak trades that for the vowels and the punctuation. neither is better — they are different bets, and it seemed worth saying which one you are making.
set dvorak up on your machine first
this site draws the dvorak layout and expects dvorak characters — it does not remap your keys. the remapping belongs to your operating system, for two reasons: muscle memory learned inside one browser tab works nowhere else on your computer, and if you have already switched at the os level, a site that remapped on top of it would double the change and produce nonsense.
dvorak is the oldest alternative layout in common use and every one of these four ships with it. nothing needs installing anywhere.
windows
Settings → Time & language → Language & region. Under your language, open the three-dot menu → Language options → Add a keyboard, and pick “United States-Dvorak”. It has shipped with Windows for decades, so nothing needs downloading. Switch between layouts with the Windows key + Space.
macos
System Settings → Keyboard → Text Input → Input Sources → Edit → the + button. Under English, choose Dvorak. There is also a “Dvorak - QWERTY ⌘” variant that reverts to QWERTY while the Command key is held, so cut, copy and paste stay under the fingers that already know them — worth trying if the shortcuts are what puts you off.
linux
Dvorak ships with the standard X keyboard map on every mainstream distribution. In GNOME: Settings → Keyboard → Input Sources → + → English → English (Dvorak). On KDE: System Settings → Input Devices → Keyboard → Layouts. From a terminal, setxkbmap us -variant dvorak does the same for the current session.
chromebook
Settings → Device → Keyboard → Change input settings → Input methods → Add input method, then choose “US Dvorak keyboard”. Switch between layouts with Ctrl + Shift + Space. On a managed school device this may be locked by an administrator.
keep the physical keycaps as they are. moving them turns the board into a chart you look at, and looking down is the habit the whole course exists to break.
what the course covers
20 lessons: the home row first, then the reaches — punctuation among them, where dvorak actually puts it — then capitals, the number row taught anchor-first, and the last marks that need shift. progress for dvorak is kept separately from any qwerty or colemak practice you have done here — per-key accuracy does not transfer between layouts, so mixing them would make every reading dishonest. switching back finds your other history exactly where you left it.
the rest of the site — free practice, the daily line, the bookshelf, your own pasted text — works in dvorak too. it draws whichever layout you last used and keeps its own record for it.
the qwerty course · the colemak course · typing guides · printable charts