FontPop documentation

FontPop is a font picker, not a font manager. It reads the fonts on your Mac and shows you the ones on Google Fonts beside them; it never installs, moves, activates or deletes anything. What it gives you is text on your clipboard.

Installing

Open the downloaded FontPop.dmg and drag FontPop to your Applications folder. The first launch opens the picker so you can see what it is; after that it waits in the menu bar.

FontPop needs no permissions at all. It reads font files and asks Google’s servers for the font catalog — nothing else.

Summoning it

Press ⌘⌥F from anywhere, or click the Aa icon in the menu bar. Press it again, or press Escape, to put it away.

FontPop has no Dock icon, deliberately: an app with one is tied to a single Space and can’t appear over a full-screen app, which is exactly when you tend to want a font picker. If you open FontPop again from the Finder or Spotlight while it’s already running, it summons the picker.

Right-click the menu bar icon to switch between the popover (hanging off the icon) and a floating window that remembers where you put it. Either can be resized from any edge or corner.

Your sample text

The field at the top of the middle column is the point of the app. Type anything into it and every row redraws in that text. Judge a typeface on the words you’re actually setting — a name, a headline, a price — rather than on somebody else’s pangram. The size slider beside it scales every row at once.

Scopes and filters

The sidebar answers one question: what am I looking at. All Fonts, Installed (the ones you added), System (Apple’s), and Google Fonts. Below that, collections — Pinned, Monospace, Variable — and then styles: serif, sans, slab, script, display, symbol.

A Google font you’ve already installed appears once, and shows up under both Installed and Google Fonts.

Searching

Search is focused the moment the picker opens, so you can just start typing. It matches family names, and it narrows the sidebar too — categories with no matches drop out, so you can see at a glance where the matches live.

Fonts that can render your text

Paste text in a script you care about — Vietnamese, Polish, Greek, Cyrillic — into the sample field and click the checkmark beside it. The list collapses to the fonts that can actually draw every character.

For installed fonts this is exact: FontPop asks the font itself. For Google fonts that aren’t installed there’s no file to ask, so it goes on the subsets Google publishes for the family — close, but a claim rather than a measurement.

Pinning

Hover any row and click the pin. Pinned fonts float to the top of whatever you’re looking at. There’s a Pinned scope in the sidebar, and an Unpin All in Settings ▸ Fonts.

Copy formats

Select a font and the details pane offers every form it can hand you:

• Family and PostScript names.
• SwiftUI — Font.custom("…", fixedSize:) — and AppKit’s NSFont(name:size:). Both use the PostScript name, because that’s what actually resolves.
• CSS stack, with a generic fallback matched to the font’s own class.
• @font-face for a font you’re self-hosting.
• <link> and @import for Google fonts, with every weight the family offers.
• As image — the sample rendered at 2× for dropping into a mockup.

Right-click any row in the list for the same formats without leaving the list.

Variable axes

For a variable font, the details pane gives you a slider per axis. Drag one and the sample redraws in that instance; Copy CSS gives you the font-variation-settings that produced it.

This works for fonts installed on your Mac. Google serves fixed instances rather than the variable file, so a Google font you haven’t installed lists its axes but can’t be dragged — install the family and the sliders appear.

The glyph browser

The Glyphs row in the details pane shows how many characters a font contains; the magnifying glass opens them all. Search by typing a character, by its Unicode name, or by U+ codepoint. Click a glyph to copy it, or right-click for its codepoint, HTML entity or Swift literal.

Very large fonts are capped at the first 6,000 characters — the footer says so when that happens.

Getting a Google font

FontPop previews a Google font by fetching a single weight temporarily. That copy is not a font you own, so it isn’t offered as a file.

When you want the real thing, use Download Family: pick a folder and FontPop fetches every weight and italic, plus the license file the font is distributed under, named the way Google names them. Then install them however you like — dragging them onto Font Book is the usual way.

View on Google Fonts opens the family’s page if you’d rather go to the source.

Keyboard

• ⌘⌥F — show or hide FontPop, from anywhere.
• ⌘F — jump to the search field.
• ↑ / ↓ — move through the list, even while typing.
• Return — copy the selected family name.
• Escape — leave the search field, or put FontPop away.
• ⌘W — close the picker, or the frontmost FontPop window.

Settings

General — start at login, the menu bar icon, the summon shortcut, updates and your license. Appearance — popover or window, whether an outside click dismisses the popover, and which panes show. Sidebar — which rows appear. Fonts — the catalog status, your sample text and size, and your pins.

Updates

FontPop checks for updates daily and can install them itself. Check manually from the … menu, or from Settings ▸ General.

Licensing

FontPop is free to try. Every tenth time you open the picker, unlicensed, it shows a reminder — no watermark, no expiry, nothing withheld. A license removes the reminder.

Buy from the button on the FontPop page, then paste the key into Enter License. One license covers your own Macs. FontPop is also in the bundles.