The letters printed on your keycaps and the layout your operating system is using are not always the same thing, which is why Q turns into A or Y and Z swap after a settings change. Press the six highlighted keys one at a time, whatever is printed on them, and the detector matches what they produce against the common layouts. Switch to free typing to sharpen the result, and read the diagram to see the letters your keyboard actually sends. Repeat the mac keyboard test a few times for a more reliable reading.
Compares produced characters with layout signatures
Key
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Press Start by pressing the first highlighted key.
Press the dashed key on the diagram.
Keys turn green and take on the character they actually produced, so the diagram becomes a picture of your real layout.
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Match by layout
Press at least two of the asked keys for a first guess.
Use this keyboard layout detector to detect your keyboard layout in seconds: press a few keys and compare what each one types with the QWERTY, AZERTY and QWERTZ patterns below. Knowing your keyboard layout helps you fix wrong characters, choose the right Windows input source and buy matching keyboard stickers.
A keyboard layout detector is a free tool that works by comparing physical keys with the characters they produce. Every key sends a position-based code such as KeyQ plus a typed character, and that pairing differs between a US English keyboard and a French one. Matching those pairs is the heart of keyboard layout detection, and it is why the same keyboard layout can look different on two computers. Want a closer look at mac keyboard on windows? A free tool on this site shows you in seconds.
Click inside the typing box and press a handful of letter keys. The browser reports the key codes for each physical key and the character it typed, and the tool can analyze those character mappings to identify the layout type. A thorough test also reads the navigator language and Keyboard API support, since both hint at your region, but the keys you press decide the result. Run it again after any keyboard layout change to confirm the new setting, and keep the keyboard layout you detected in mind when you read the result.
Detectors then score each candidate keyboard layout:
$$\text{layout confidence} = \frac{\text{matched keys}}{\text{keys pressed}} \times 100$$
Say you press Q, W, A, Z, M and Y and the box shows a, z, q, w, a comma and y. Scoring all three major keyboard layouts gives this:
| Candidate keyboard layout | Matched keys | Layout confidence |
|---|---|---|
| AZERTY keyboard layout | 6 of 6 | 100% |
| QWERTY keyboard layout | 1 of 6 | 17% |
| QWERTZ keyboard layout | 0 of 6 | 0% |
That result tells you the board is a French-style AZERTY, even if the label on your screen says English. Your keyboard layout, not your hardware, produced the mismatch, so you can change the Windows input source or buy keyboard stickers that match the physical keys.
A visual keyboard lights up each key as you press it, so you can watch the keys pressed counter climb and see the layout type firm up. Hardware and software both matter here: the hardware sends a physical key, and the operating system software translates it using your language settings. Privacy deserves a mention too. Your layout reveals regional settings and language preferences, and together with other browser traits it feeds browser fingerprinting. A fingerprint built this way helps a site narrow down your locale, so users who care about privacy should know the layout is readable by any page. The detector itself needs only the keys you press, so treat any extra data a page collects as optional.
Most keyboard layouts in daily use belong to a few families. This table shows how to recognize each keyboard layout from its top row and one telltale key. Repeat the rapid trigger test a few times for a more reliable reading.
| Keyboard layout | Top-row letters | Typical region | Quick clue |
|---|---|---|---|
| QWERTY keyboard layout | Q W E R T Y | US, UK, Canada, Australia | Z sits bottom left |
| AZERTY keyboard layout | A Z E R T Y | France, Belgium | Q and A swapped, W bottom left |
| QWERTZ keyboard layout | Q W E R T Z | Germany, Switzerland, Austria | Y and Z swapped |
| Dvorak keyboard layout | ' , . P Y | Alternative English | Vowels on the left home row |
| Colemak keyboard layout | Q W F P G | Alternative English | Keeps most QWERTY shortcuts |
Compare your own keyboard layout with each row before you trust any detector, because the keyboard layout label in Windows can be wrong while the printed keyboard layout is right.
QWERTY is the default for English speakers and the baseline for every keyboard layout test. Dvorak moves the vowels to the home row, while Colemak changes only 17 keys so familiar shortcuts survive. Both are alternative English layouts that people pick for comfort and typing speed rather than for a country, and checking compatibility with your shortcuts first saves frustration.
AZERTY swaps A with Q and Z with W, moves M beside L, and needs Shift to type numbers on the top row. QWERTZ swaps Y and Z and adds umlaut keys. Belgian and French boards are both AZERTY, so they are easy to misidentify, and Swiss and German boards share the Y and Z swap but place symbols differently. ANSI and ISO describe the physical shape instead: an ANSI board has a wide, horizontal Enter key, while an ISO board has a tall Enter key and one extra key beside the left Shift. The detector cannot see that shape, so check the Enter key by eye, and let it separate AZERTY from QWERTZ by pressing A, Q, Z and Y.
Windows ties every laptop keyboard and desktop keyboard to a layout name in its settings. Open the time and language settings, find the listed input source and compare it with your physical keys. Identify the layout on a laptop keyboard first by checking the Enter key shape and where the @ and quote keys sit, then repeat the check on a desktop keyboard, because a desktop keyboard and a laptop can ship with different keyboard layouts. If the printed caps and the typed characters disagree, the input source is wrong, not your hardware. On a Mac the same check lives in the keyboard settings, and Linux distributions offer an equivalent menu.
The US English keyboard layout has a wide horizontal Enter key and the @ sign on the 2 key. The UK English keyboard layout has an L-shaped Enter key, a pound sign on the 3 key and the @ sign on the apostrophe key. US International looks identical to US English but adds the Euro symbol and an Alt Gr key, which is why it is so often misidentified.
Russian, Greek, Hebrew and Arabic keyboards print two alphabets on every key. A Russian keyboard layout puts Cyrillic letters on the Latin keys, and the Greek keyboard layout does the same with Greek letters, so a Russian or Greek laptop keyboard rarely shows Latin caps at all. Turkish adds a twist, since Q and F variants of the Turkish keyboard layout exist. When your laptop lacks the second alphabet, keyboard stickers can label the keys so the physical caps match your input language.
The Japanese keyboard layout adds kana characters and extra keys beside the space bar, and a Korean keyboard layout prints hangul on the same keys as Latin letters. Bengali and other Indic layouts rely on the Windows input source alone, so most desktop keyboard hardware has no printed caps for them. Buying keyboard stickers or a language-specific board is the usual fix. The detector reports the Latin letters each key sends, so a Japanese or Korean board can read as US English until you also check the input language. A Japanese or Korean laptop keyboard is easiest to confirm with the detector tool because the extra keys differ from any Western keyboard layout.
A laptop keyboard and a desktop keyboard can carry different keyboard layouts even when both run the same copy of Windows. A laptop keyboard is built into the case, so its keyboard layout is fixed at the factory and reflects the country where the laptop was sold. A desktop keyboard is a separate device, so its keyboard layout reflects whichever model you plugged in, and a second desktop keyboard on the same desk can use yet another keyboard layout.
That is why a laptop keyboard that looks like US English may type UK English characters after a Windows update, and why a desktop keyboard bought abroad shows the wrong symbols. Check the laptop keyboard layout first, then the desktop keyboard layout, and note which keyboard layout the detector reports for each. Laptop and desktop users who switch between both should keep one input source per keyboard layout, because a single desktop setting cannot match two different physical layouts. Laptop shoppers can also read the keyboard layout on the product page before buying a laptop or a desktop keyboard.
If the laptop keyboard and desktop keyboard layout do not match the input source, change the input source rather than the hardware. Switching the keyboard layout in settings takes seconds, while keyboard stickers are the permanent fix when the printed keys disagree with the keyboard layout you type on every day. Whenever you move a desktop keyboard to another laptop or desktop, run the detector again to confirm the keyboard layout.
Last month I picked up a used laptop from a seller in Berlin, and every “y” I typed came out as “z”. Before touching any setting, I wanted to know which keyboard layout the machine was really using, and whether Windows or the hardware was at fault.
I opened the detector and pressed nine keys in this order: Y, Z, Q, W, A, M, then the three keys to the right of P, L and 0. The box showed z, y, q, w, a, m, ö, ü and ß. Scoring is simple: 9 keys pressed, 9 matched the QWERTZ pattern, so layout confidence was 100%. A US QWERTY board would have produced y, z, q, w, a, m, semicolon, bracket and hyphen, which matches only 4 of 9, or 44%.
| Keys used for scoring | QWERTZ match | QWERTY match | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| All 9 keys | 100% | 44% | 56 points |
| 6 letter keys only | 100% | 67% | 33 points |
That sensitivity rerun is the part I would remember: dropping the three symbol keys shrank the gap from 56 to 33 points. Letters alone are enough to separate QWERTY from QWERTZ, but the symbol keys make the call much harder to dispute.
One caveat: German and Swiss German boards both swap Y and Z, so the letters alone cannot tell them apart. The ß key settles it, since Swiss boards have no ß, and it points to the Windows layout German, KLID 00000407. I cross-checked that code against a Windows layout reference before trusting it.
The decision was easy. The hardware was a genuine German keyboard, and Windows had been set to US English. I switched the input source to German and the Y and Z keys behaved. I would not rely on this method for a keyboard with remapped keys, since a software remap changes the characters but not the printed caps, and the detector would report the remap, not the hardware.
Keyboard layout info sites document every layout Windows ships, including how each key behaves in each state. They are the best place to check an unusual keyboard layout after the detector narrows it down.
Each keyboard layout defines its dead keys, shift states and virtual keys. A dead key, such as the accent that waits for a vowel, modifies the next character, and shift states cover combinations of Shift, Control, Alt and Alt Gr. Some layouts also map ligatures and Unicode symbols to chords, and function keys are usually identical across them. A dead key produces no character until the next key, so press a plain letter after it before the detector reads the result.
The Windows registry stores every layout under a KLID number, and each keyboard driver decides which key produces which character. One keyboard driver can serve several layouts. Layouts are also linked by a BCP-47 language tag, so the language tag, the locale and the input languages in your settings can differ from the layout you actually type on. Pick the country and region carefully, and remember that keyboard drivers differ between Windows, Mac and Linux.
Once the detector has named your layout, keyboard layout analysis shows whether it suits your typing. A keyboard layout analyzer scores a keyboard layout against real text and reports where the strain falls.
A keyboard layout analyzer such as Carpalx measures typing effort through finger travel, hand alternation and finger usage, then draws heatmaps of the busiest keys. An ergonomic keyboard layout usually means less finger travel and more hand alternation, which is the core of good ergonomics. Many tools also model split keyboards, and some compare QWERTY with Dvorak and Colemak side by side.
A custom layout lets you remap any key. The Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator, known as MSKLC, is a free layout creator that builds a custom keyboard layout for Windows only. Gaming and mechanical keyboard users often remap keys this way, and it also helps accessibility when a key is hard to reach.
A keyboard tester or keyboard checker is a different tool from a layout detector: it confirms that each key works, while the detector tells you which keyboard layout the key belongs to. Run a keyboard test when a key seems dead, then run the detector when it types the wrong character.
Press any key and a keyboard test marks it as working. Hold several keys together to check for ghosting, the failure where a keyboard drops a key when too many are pressed at once. The numpad and function keys are worth testing too, and these checks tell you whether a typing problem comes from software or hardware. Pair a keyboard test with the keyboard layout check, since a laptop or desktop keyboard can pass every key test and still use the wrong keyboard layout.
It compares the physical key you press with the character that appears. QWERTY, AZERTY and QWERTZ place letters like A, Q, W, Y and Z in different spots, so a handful of keys is enough to tell them apart.
Press Q, W, A, Z, M and Y in order and enter what you see. If you get a, z, q, w, a comma and y you have AZERTY; if you get q, w, a, y, m and z you have QWERTZ; q, w, a, z, m and y means QWERTY.
It is the number of keys that matched a layout divided by the number of keys you entered, shown as a percentage. More keys give a more reliable score.
Usually the Windows or Mac input source does not match the physical keyboard. Change the input source in your system settings to the layout the detector reports.
Both use QWERTZ with Y and Z swapped, so letters alone cannot separate them. German boards have a ß key, which Swiss boards lack.
A layout reveals language and regional settings, which can contribute to browser fingerprinting. This tool only needs the characters you type into the box.
Yes. Dvorak and Colemak move specific keys, such as Y, so the same six keys score differently from QWERTY.