Clearing Recently Used Fonts from the macOS Font Panel

The macOS Font Panel, for apps that support it like Notes, TextEdit, and XX, allows you to quickly pick a font, point size, and color. It also displays categories of fonts, including a list of the Recently Used Fonts.

It’s not completely clear to me when and why a font is added to the Recently Used List, but the app in which I most frequently use the Font Panel is in Notes. Most of my notes are written in Georgia 14, because it’s easy for me to read even on my iPhone.

As you can see, my Recently Used Fonts is a list of repeated instances of Georgia 14:

The Recently Used Fonts list is derived from the plist com.apple.Recents.collection. The plist is stored in ~/Library/FontCollections.

To purge the Recently Used Fonts List

1. Close any apps that might use the Font Panel.
2. Go to ~/Library/FontCollections.
3. Drag com.apple.Recents.collection to your Desktop or compress it in place.
4. Open Notes.
5. Press Command-T or choose Font/Show Fonts from the Format menu in Notes.
6. Click Recently Used Fonts in the sidebar of the Font Panel.
7. Your Recently Used Fonts list should be empty.
8. Delete the com.apple.Recents.collection file from your Desktop or delete the compressed version from ~/Library/FontCollections.