Alice95Procedure

The same default text was used (Alice in Wonderland, chapter I), but a 9 character (not otherwise present) was inserted after every 20th character, as a proxy for backspace. The keyboard layouts were all edited to move 9 to the backspace position. Though professional typists taking dictation have well above 95% accuracy, for normal humans working (including editing and rewriting) that is actually a very high estimate. If anything, these figures still underestimate the importance of the backspace key.

I am not going to do another round of scoring where I insert proxies for the arrow keys, but if I did do that with 5% arrows, Qwpr would get approximately the same boost relative to all the others, and Colemak would fall behind just as much as the others did here. The only other layout I know of with accessible arrow keys by default is the German-based "Neo".

postscript: I just found a blog post from Stephen Wolfram in which he says that 7% of his logged keystrokes — over 100 million of them logged from 2002-2012 — are backspace. And he's probably a better and more-prolific programmer than you are. Unfortunately, he doesn't say how many are arrow keys. Still, even if it's just 3%, that would (by my rough estimation) make Qwpr neck-and-neck with Colemak even for English text.