See, what I would like to know is, what aspects of keyboard design <i>actually</i> make the keyboard more efficient? Most discussions I've read about QWERTY vs Dvorak, etc. eventually turn into personal anecdotes or debates about economic ideology, which <i>has nothing to do with keyboard design</i>.<p>Optimizing keyboard layout to have common letters on the home row and alternating hands during typical usage seems like a reasonable principle. Dvorak is significantly better at <i>that</i> than QWERTY, at least for English text. (Neither was designed with Norwegian or C in mind, obviously.) Years ago, there was a website* in which the author used genetic programming to evolve better keyboard layouts, seeded with QWERTY, Dvorak, and a few others. Dvorak was never <i>best</i>, but tended to place highly. But the more important question is, how should you score keyboard layouts?<p>* My wayback machine bookmark says the author blocked it with robots.txt.<p>Is Dvoark an objectively better keyboard? I don't know. I've typed with Dvorak for about three years, and I strongly prefer it, but it could probably be better. I also don't care about typing speed - I already type fast enough to not mind getting briefly sucked into QWERTY/Dvorak threads before breakfast. ;)<p>I haven't ever used any of the really funky ergonomic keyboard designs (the Kinesis, Maltron, etc.), but that's another option, and possibly more important than layout.