Type tool does not keep selected color
If I have one fill color selected on the type tool, it changes to black the moment I click on the artboard to begin typing. It needs to stay the selected color for all tools. I shouldn't have to go back and change the color.

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Actually, this is normal.
A colored object has a fill. When you create a new object, the fill is usually inherited, right? And if you have the 'New Art Has Basic Appearance' option turned off in the Appearance panel's menu, it grabs all the appearance from the last selected object as well.
The thing is a text is not a simple object, it's a special type of a group with characters inside, and each one of them can have its own color. The text object, however, does not have its own fill by default, and if it had one, it'd go over the colored characters.
A newly created text gets the default [Basic Paragraph} paragraph styles (which can be found and edited in the dedicated panel. If you modify it to have a different color for your glyphs, you'd have it. But it won't be inherited from the last fill anyway.But I like the idea. The fact it works like this now doesn't mean it can't be done otherwise. This needs to be studied. Thanks for bringing this up. I'm moving this into feature requests section.