The font picker is one of the most commonly used drop down menus in any creative application. Despite this, the default font picker on macOS has remained largely unchanged since the early days.
The number of fonts has certainly changed, as have the fonts themselves, but the fundamental way to pick one has remained the same - a simple drop down list, ordered alphabetically. So what's wrong with this?
The Problems
It's too long — the more fonts you add, the longer the list gets. A list that's too long becomes cluttered and hard to navigate. There's no way to de-clutter the list by manually selecting what fonts appear first.
"Recents" section is problematic — any time you use a font, it is automatically added to the top of the "recents" section. This means that even fonts you only use once get prime spot at the top of the list for a period of time. For many use cases, this is not ideal behaviour.
No easy way to navigate with the keyboard — typing a key on the keyboard usually takes you to the first font beginning with that letter. Apart from using the arrow keys to manually move through each font, there's no easy way to navigate the native font picker with a keyboard.
The Solution
A new take on the font picker for modern computer users.
