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 fails in two unrelated ways, and only one of them is actually a hardware problem. A switch can be dead, which the board above shows directly. Or every switch can work perfectly while the keycaps say ЙЦУКЕН and the operating system quietly converts each press under an English layout instead — the far more common complaint, and one an ordinary switch tester cannot see at all.
Layout match check: the fault a switch test cannot find
Switch to the Russian input source, then press the eight home-row keys in turn — ФЫВА on the left, ОЛДЖ on the right — and check what each one actually produces against the letter printed on its cap. All eight matching means ЙЦУКЕН is live and correct; all eight arriving as Latin means the switches are fine and the input source reverted to English, fixed with Alt+Shift or the language bar rather than a repair.
Worth knowing before you read a mismatch as a fault: Windows and macOS both ship a second Russian input source alongside the standard one, usually labelled "Russian (phonetic)" in the language list, built for people who already know QWERTY and want Cyrillic letters sitting roughly where their Latin sound-alikes are, rather than where the standard layout puts them. Test against the wrong one of the two and you get a run of mismatches that looks exactly like a fault and is actually the wrong Russian source selected — check which one is active before concluding a key is wrong.
Cyrillic output test: checking what actually reaches a text box
The output test underneath asks the same question 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 show up on particular keys, and a whole word exercises punctuation and capitals as well as letters.
It reports Cyrillic rather than Russian, deliberately. A character range identifies a writing system, never a language — Ukrainian, Bulgarian and Serbian text all land in the same Unicode range as Russian — so a claim that "Russian arrived" would be a guess dressed up as a measurement.
Reading the ЙЦУКЕН board
Cyrillic needs seven keys the Latin alphabet doesn't reserve for letters, because it has 33 of them against QWERTY's 26, and it takes those seven from the punctuation row: Х and Ъ sit on the bracket keys, Ж and Э on the semicolon and apostrophe, Б and Ю on the comma and period. Ё, a separate letter from Е rather than a diacritic, is pushed out to the backquote position in the top-left corner — the same physical switch a Latin layout uses for the backtick, just carrying a different character here.
Two similar-looking letters are worth telling apart, because they don't sit anywhere near each other. Ъ, the hard sign, is one of the relocated keys — it takes the right bracket position, next to Х on the left — so a dead switch there is easy to write off as "just a punctuation key." Ь, the soft sign, sits nowhere unusual at all: it's an ordinary letter key, in the position a US board prints M. Both mark real distinctions in Russian spelling rather than being decorative, so either one failing breaks specific, common words instead of announcing itself as an obviously missing letter.
The full stop moves too, onto the key a US board prints as forward slash, since Б and Ю already claimed comma and period. It's the single most common complaint from someone typing ЙЦУКЕН for the first time — the letters are learnable, the punctuation feels missing — so press it deliberately rather than assuming the key doesn't exist.
Numpad test on a Russian board
ЙЦУКЕН has no opinion on the numpad — standard or phonetic, either Russian source leaves it sending the same ten digits it always does, because layout conversion is a letter-keys-only affair. Everything else about the physical board — its size, ANSI or ISO, Num Lock, multi-key rollover — is covered once, in full, on the main keyboard tester, rather than repeated here for a layout it has nothing to do with.
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.