Why exactly do we still use qwerty style keyboards? We don’t use typewriters anymore.

Question

I honestly don’t get why the heck we use this stupid layout… please somebody help me understand.

In: 131

Answer 1

Within English it’s because it became the default while keyboards were in use, and when we moved to computers basically everyone who would be using a keyboard was familiar QWERTY the convention stuck.

There’s some other standards, albeit with much more limited following. Proponents say they’re faster for typing, but a while back the GSA (IIRC) tried training typists on it vs QWERTY and didn’t see much/any advantage that would make a change worthwhile, so stuck with QWERTY as standard.

If you’d like to try some of these other ones (Eg [Dvorak](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_keyboard_layout)) you can configure your keyboard to match it and change your OS to recognize it.