Testers
Russian Keyboard Tester
Test a Russian ЙЦУКЕН keyboard in your browser. Check every switch, confirm the Cyrillic layout is live, and find keys producing the wrong letter.
Reads real keydown/keyup events and the characters they produce. Nothing you type is uploaded. Tab and Escape always keep their normal behaviour, so you're never stuck here.
- Last key
- —press any key
- Presses
- 0
- Keys tested
- 0 / 105
- Chattering
- None
- Largest rollover
- 0 keys
Layout match check
Press the eight home-row keys — this compares what each switch produced against the letter printed on it.
Rest your fingers on the home row and press ФЫВА and ОЛДЖ.
Cyrillic output test
Type a word — привет will do — and check Cyrillic reaches the box rather than Latin.
Nothing typed yet.
Key log
Press any key to start.
A Russian keyboard can fail in two completely different ways, and they need different tests. A switch can be dead — that is a hardware fault, and the board above shows it. Or every switch can work perfectly while producing the wrong letter, because the operating system is applying a Latin layout to a Cyrillic keyboard. The second is far more common, and a normal keyboard tester cannot see it at all.
Layout match check: the fault a switch test cannot find
Browsers report a keystroke through two separate signals. One is the physical
position of the switch on the board, which never changes no matter what language
you are typing. The other is the character your current layout produced from it.
A keyboard tester that reads the first is correct and useful, and completely
blind to a layout problem: press Ф with the input source set to English and the
switch reports perfectly, having produced a.
The layout match check reads both and compares them. Rest your fingers on the home row and press the eight keys under them — ФЫВА on the left, ОЛДЖ on the right. Each one is listed with the letter printed on the cap and the character that actually arrived.
All eight matching means the Russian layout is live and correct. All eight arriving as Latin means the board is fine and the input source is English — Alt+Shift on Windows, or Win+Space, will switch it. A partial match almost always means the layout changed part-way through the test, usually because a shortcut fired without being noticed.
Cyrillic output test: checking what actually reaches a text box
The output test underneath is the same question asked more loosely. Type a real word into the box and it counts how much of what arrived was Cyrillic. This is worth doing separately from the home-row sample because some layout problems only appear on particular keys, and typing a word exercises punctuation and capitals as well as letters.
It reports Cyrillic rather than Russian, deliberately. Character ranges identify a writing system, never a language — Ukrainian, Bulgarian and Serbian all land in the same range — so a claim that "Russian arrived" would be a guess presented as a measurement.
Reading the ЙЦУКЕН board
Cyrillic has 33 letters and the Latin alphabet has 26, so the arrangement needs seven more keys than QWERTY uses for letters. It takes them from the punctuation: Х and Ъ sit on the bracket keys, Ж and Э on the semicolon and apostrophe, and Б and Ю on the comma and period. Ё takes the backquote position in the top-left corner, which is why a Russian board can look as though it has no backtick key — it is the same switch, reached through the Latin layout.
That leaves the full stop nowhere obvious, and the standard puts it on the key a US board prints as forward slash. Worth pressing deliberately when you test: a dead key there is easy to mistake for a layout you simply have not learned yet.
Numpad test and the rest of the board
Choose the size that matches the keyboard in front of you — full-size, tenkeyless, 75%, 65% or 60% — and the standard, ANSI or ISO. Russian boards are sold in both shapes, and the ISO one has an extra key beside the left Shift.
Work along each row rather than hunting for the key you already suspect. If a numpad key does nothing, check Num Lock first: with it off, those keys send Home, End and the arrows instead of digits, which looks exactly like a dead number pad. Hold three keys at once and watch whether all three stay lit — if one drops out, the keyboard's matrix is blocking that combination.
Questions
- Why does my Russian keyboard type English letters?
- Because the keycaps and the operating system's input source are two separate things, and only the second one decides what a key produces. A Russian keyboard is dual-printed — Cyrillic in one colour, Latin in another, on the same cap — and Windows or macOS chooses which arrangement is live. When the input source is set to English, every switch works perfectly and every switch produces a Latin letter, which is why a normal keyboard tester reports no fault at all. Use the layout match check on this page: press the eight home-row keys and it tells you which character each switch actually produced against the letter printed on it. If they all come back Latin, nothing is broken and you need Alt+Shift, Win+Space, or the language bar rather than a new keyboard.
- What is the ЙЦУКЕН layout?
- It is the standard Russian keyboard arrangement, named after its top-left six letters in exactly the way QWERTY is. Cyrillic has 33 letters against the Latin alphabet's 26, so ЙЦУКЕН uses every letter key plus the four keys a US board spends on brackets, semicolon and apostrophe — which is why Х, Ъ, Ж and Э sit where a US keyboard prints [, ], ; and '. Ё takes the backquote position in the top-left corner. The arrangement is standardised, so any keyboard sold in Russia and any Windows Russian input source use the same one.
- Where is the full stop on a Russian keyboard?
- On the key a US board prints as forward slash, at the right-hand end of the bottom row. It has to go somewhere unusual because Б and Ю take the comma and period keys, and this is the single most common complaint from someone typing on a Russian layout for the first time — the letters are learnable but the punctuation feels missing. Select ЙЦУКЕН above and look at the bottom row: you will see Б, Ю and then the full stop where the slash normally lives. Press it and confirm it registers; a dead key there is easily mistaken for a layout you have not learned yet.
- Is my keyboard broken or is it a layout problem?
- Those are different faults with different evidence, and this page separates them. If a key stays pale on the board above when you press it, the browser never received an event for that switch — that is a hardware problem, and the switch, the cable or a whole row is at fault. If every key lights up correctly but the layout match check shows Latin characters arriving, nothing is broken at all: the switches are reporting exactly as they should and the operating system is converting them under a different layout. The first case needs a repair; the second needs a keyboard shortcut.
- Does the ЙЦУКЕН layout work for Ukrainian and Bulgarian too?
- Not exactly, and this page is deliberately careful about the difference. Ukrainian, Belarusian, Bulgarian and Serbian all write in Cyrillic but each has its own keyboard arrangement — Ukrainian adds І, Ї, Є and Ґ and drops Ы, Э and Ъ, and the Bulgarian standard is a different arrangement entirely. The board shown here is the Russian one. The Cyrillic output test underneath is broader: it reports that Cyrillic characters arrived, which is true and useful for any of those languages, and it stops short of claiming to know which language you typed, because a Unicode range identifies a script and never a language.
- Is anything I type sent to a server?
- No. Every keystroke and every character it produced is read and counted inside this page, and none of it is uploaded. That matters here because testing a layout means typing real words rather than tapping keys at random. All-time totals live in this browser's local storage, so clearing your browser data clears them. The site counts page views in aggregate, which the privacy page describes in full.