physical - Keyboard shortcuts on non-QWERTY keyboard layouts

I've been using the Dvorak keyboard layout for a few years, and something that's always bothered me is keyboard shortcuts. On a QWERTY keyboard copy and paste are conveniently positioned as Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V, but on Dvorak they are pretty inconvenient (equivalent to Ctrl+I and Ctrl+. on QWERTY).

I would have figured the 'right' thing to do would be to have the keyboard shortcuts based on position, rather than value. So switching to Dvorak would change copy and paste to Ctrl+J and Ctrl+K (which are in the same position as C and V on QWERTY), but very few applications do this. In fact, the only one that comes to mind is Inkscape. I get that implementing it that way is harder, but not even Windows does it, so I figure there must be some further reasoning behind it?

I'm also interested in how certain international keyboards are handled, such as Arabic and Russian keyboards, which don't have any Latin characters.

Answer

The UX answer is that people tend to think of which key they are pressing rather than the position of the key. So it makes more sense to keep the shortcut linked to the key than the position of the key - even if that position is awkward.

While it could be beneficial to add profiles for different applications, you would have the situation where one program uses Ctrl-C and another Ctrl-I. This would hurt overall UX even more.

You can remap the system shortcuts on many Operating Systems, which should change the shortcuts for every application. So if someone needs them to change, this would be the best solution.

Out of interest, the Colemak layout takes common shortcut positions into account and retains most of the Qwerty shortcut positions. It's also more efficient than Dvorak.

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Technically and historically:

There is an intentional separation between what is pressed on a keyboard and where it is pressed. The only thing that every OS that I have seen cares about is the keycode that the input should be - and that is as it should be. There are many different physical keyboard designs, not to mention other devices (such as presenter pointers) which act as input devices. This all results in it being extremely difficult to make the shortcuts based on a physical position.