fontina mission statement

fontina is the font manager for the people: a single small binary that indexes, searches, previews, activates and organises fonts on Linux, macOS and Windows, keeps everything in plain files you own, never phones home, and will still work in twenty years.

The promises

Everything in the roadmap serves one of these. They are checked in continuous integration or refused in review; they are not aspirations.

Terminal first

The command line is the product. Every capability exists as a command that prints text or JSON before it exists anywhere else. The browser (fontina ui) and any later graphical shell are clients of the same core and add no capabilities of their own.

Your data stays yours, in formats you can read

One SQLite file for the index, JSON with a published schema for every export, TOML for configuration, fontconfig XML on Linux. Nothing that needs fontina to open. Delete the binary and your fonts, folders and operating-system font registrations are exactly as you left them; the index rebuilds from disk in seconds.

Nothing leaves the machine

No network calls, no accounts, no update checks, no crash reporting, no telemetry, ever. Online catalogs, if they ever come, are opt-in, separately packaged and off by default.

Light

A static binary with no runtime, no bundled browser, no daemon unless you ask for one. Hard budgets on size, start time and memory are enforced in continuous integration.

Fast

Ten thousand files indexed in seconds, any query in milliseconds, the browser repaints within a frame. Parallel scans, an indexed database, no busywork at startup.

Durable

Append-only migrations, stable command output, stable check identifiers, semantic versioning. A script written against 1.0 runs against 3.0. Dependencies are few, audited and replaceable; the only hand-written codec is WOFF 1.0.

Correct

Parsing by Google's fontations, the code Chrome and Skia use. Shaping by HarfBuzz's Rust port on the same stack. Families from name IDs 16 and 17 and STAT, never from file names. Standards for every artefact: OpenType, WOFF, CSS Fonts Level 4, SPDX, XDG, fontconfig, JSON Schema, TOML.

Every desktop is first class, Linux first

Per-user install and temporary activation implemented natively on all three systems, no elevation, never a write to a system font directory. Linux is the reference platform: fontconfig integration, distribution packages, and the terminals people actually use are tested first.

Free software, no strings

GPL-3.0-or-later, for the library, the command line and the browser, so that nobody downstream can take these freedoms away from the next person. Contributions are accepted under the same terms, with no contributor agreement and no copyright assignment. The manual is under the GNU Free Documentation License. A public roadmap, a decision record for every structural choice, reproducible release builds with provenance and a bill of materials. fontina answers the same question about your fonts: list --free shows the ones you may study, modify and pass on.

Non-goals

Font editing. Format conversion or subsetting; that is fonttools’ job. Cloud synchronisation. Accounts. Telemetry. In-process plugins. An Electron shell.

How decisions are made

There is one maintainer for now. Decisions worth arguing about are written down as architecture decision records before the code lands, and a record is never edited after acceptance; a change of mind is a new record. The contributing page says how to take part.

The name

fontina: one letter from the thing it manages, free on every package registry, and a pun of the kind GNU names are usually built from. The working name until 2026-09-04 was “unifont”, which collided with GNU Unifont, the bitmap font.