Popular is the category Diagram mode's palette opens on. Its twelve tiles sit right on the palette strip, picked from across the palette, so the shapes and tools you use most are one click away. Each tile behaves exactly like the same tile in its home category: click it and then click the canvas to drop it, or drag on the canvas to draw it at a size, or drag the tile straight onto the canvas. Tiles preview the tab's theme the same way.
What's in it
Square, Circle, Diamond, Text, Arrow, Frame, Mind Node, Flowchart, Sankey, Table, AWS (opens the AWS marks) and Entity.
The list is fixed and the same for everyone: using a tile never reorders it, and it can't be edited. Everything else is one pick away in the category picker just before the tiles, or a search away with the strip's Search.
Other modes
Workshop and Pages show their categories along the strip by name instead, each opening a panel of its elements, so they have no Popular. Plan mode's palette opens on Cards (or Boards, until the tab has a board), an Event Storming board opens on its own notation, and Draw mode shows its own pens.
Every time you open a document
The palette strip opens on Popular each time a document loads, rather than on the last category you used, and shows its twelve tiles (fewer on a narrow window, with the rest behind More).
Several Popular tiles have a single-key shortcut, so you can skip the palette altogether: R for a square, O a circle, D a diamond, T text, A an arrow and F a frame. Hold ⌘ (Ctrl on Windows) to see each tile's shortcut on the palette. See Keyboard Shortcuts.
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