In Figma, when choosing a font, you can filter down a list of fonts from “all” to specific categories or e.g. only fonts present in the current file.

But when you type into the search field, the search cuts across all fonts again, ignoring the applied filter. The search effectively lives outside the filter.

In Keyboard Maestro, when adding an action, you can click in the nav to filter down to a specific category. And when you search, the current filter remains active, so you search inside the filter.

Which one is better?

I don’t have a universal rule here, because it will depend both on the UI treatment, and the specific filters and searches people do.

But I think here, my recommendation for Keyboard Maestro here would be to do the same thing as Figma does. I designed that flow in Figma, so I might be biased, but my reasons are:

• There aren’t really a lot of options in each category, so you don’t benefit a lot from double filtering.
• But the most important thing: For both Figma and Keyboard Maestro, the text field might smell like a text filter and as such expected to be multiplexed with the category filter, but I think this field is actually something else: It’s quick keyboard access, like ⌘F or Spotlight or Raycast. And if you think about it this way, it’s important for it to be deterministic – I can always type “Output Sans,” no matter what state am I in, and get to the font.

On that last note, I find it’s good to look around what you’ve designed once in a while and consider not what the UI set out to be, but what it became – there might be more examples of that around you.