The current font viewer feature in Visual Studio Mac is implemented using a combination of XWT and SkiaSharp.
While this works, it needs to render all font glyphs when a font is opened (rather than using the native AppKit rendering). This causes very high load times as the glyphs are rendered into pngs and then loaded from disk into memory. As such, the performance of this feature is very poor and is not a nice user experience.
The viewer should be re-written in AppKit, replicating the existing Font Viewer user interface and leveraging NSCollectionView to display the font glyphs in a list.
The current font viewer feature in Visual Studio Mac is implemented using a combination of XWT and SkiaSharp.
While this works, it needs to render all font glyphs when a font is opened (rather than using the native AppKit rendering). This causes very high load times as the glyphs are rendered into pngs and then loaded from disk into memory. As such, the performance of this feature is very poor and is not a nice user experience.
The viewer should be re-written in AppKit, replicating the existing Font Viewer user interface and leveraging NSCollectionView to display the font glyphs in a list.