are there other keyboard formats available?
Yeah, There are about 5 others I have heard about. But I can't really remember since I only use QWERTY format and didn't pay attention to it in class.
Qwerty was arranged so a mechanical typewriter wouldn't jam. Then electric typewriters came along and typist efficiency became the weak link. Dvorak is a more efficient way of typing, but it's biased for right handed people. Two problems: manual typewriters didn't go away all at once but lingered for another fifty years, and typists had been trained in Qwerty for the past eighty. Yes, there are others. Go fish. ?bergeeks can buy a keyboard that's totally blank--nothing printed on any of the keys. Most systems ship with some means of selecting Dvorak if you prefer that. I'll stick with Qwerty because I'm a traditionalist and still have a couple of manual typewriters around. Avoiding fatigue is a matter of posture, avoiding keyjams is a matter of rhythm. I'm not claiming to have either one. That's just what they tell me.
There are lots of various types of keyboard layouts see this site:
