If you’re a font hoarder like me, you’re likely to have a folder somewhere in your cloud drive that has hundreds of thousands of TTFs, OTFs. However, the process of installing fonts had always been a daunting one.

Normally, on Linux, the poor UX ideology means you have to resort to the terminal to get things done, a most unituitive way. On Windows,you can just type the word ‘Fonts’ in the Run dialog and get access to the font folder, while it’s not ideal, it’s still far better UX than OS X and Linux. However, on Windows, there’s one major obstacle, you need admin right to get access to the system font folder. At least on OS X and Linux, you can install the fonts locally.

Historically, people had to resort to a dirty workaround, that is to install PortableApps.com. It’s a messy hack as this app wasn’t specifically designed for this purpose.

Thankfully now we have a more elegant solution.

Let me introduce you guys to the best font manager out there: FontBase yes I know it’s another ElectronJS app, you know I fucking love them. They work cross-platform, and I’m a cross-platform freak.

In the past I’ve used other font managers including Extensis Suitcase Fusion ($120, who the fuck blows that much money on a font manager) and Proxima FontExpert which is a bit better than Extensis at half the price ($59) but it suffers from some major UX issues (I mean, Ctrl+Q for a GoTo dialog? Do they not know most other programs use that short cut for a Quit command? And who the fuck still uses the old school Open/Save dialog that does NOT have a field to directly input the path? Holy mother of incompetent programmers!)

FontBase is far better than those dumb shits, not only because it’s Free (though I do admit I’m majorly biased thanks to that, I’m a giant fucking cheapskate), but also because it integrates very well with the Google Fonts library, which is super important to web designers like me who rely on it on a daily basis. One click and you can have the entire fucking library installed on your system, how neat is that? This is not only convenient but it also indicates that the dev are actually people who relate with designers, they know their target audience, and they stay up to date with current tech, unlike Proxima who still couldn’t code a simple open/dialog windows.

(by the way if you want to use your fonts without admin right, you need to keep FontBase running in the background, much in the way you’d use PortableApps)