Optimal keyboard layouts

If you always wanted to start a holy war, but don’t feel strongly enough about anything to start bashing your opponents, consider keyboard layouts. Go through a random selection of 100 engineers or computer scientists, whose professional or academic life involves using computers daily, and you’ll discover at least one supporter of the Dvorak layout, ready to prove why it’s faster and more efficient. However, is QWERTY better than Dvorak? Or is Dvorak better than QWERTY? The answer to both questions is no.

To generate your own optimized layout, Microsoft has this Keyboard Layout Creator utility that I just noticed recently. Before that I was always carrying a copy of Keyboard Layout Manager, not to change the QWERTY setup, but to have my own Cyrillic keyboard.

Microsoft Keyboard Layout Crreator - create your own custom layouts in any language

Posted Friday, April 30th, 2004 under Technology.
  • Erwin Brosam

    Using the Microsoft’s Keyboard Layout Creator, is it possible to create a layout for specific games, such as the key w is used in some games for moving in a forward direction.