Drupal 7.x and Add Content Checkbox / Radio Filter?

I’m using Drupal 7.x and the Entity Reference module and one thing I’m learning is that this “auto-complete” widget just isn’t cutting it: I’d like to instead use a check-box widget that has a means to filter for values.

So let’s say you have an Entity Reference field used to select various fruits and vegetables. If it’s set to use a check-box type widget, you’ll see a LONG list of available check-box values… This sucks for big lists. It would be ideal to have a means to make the container of the list be scrollable whereby a secondary filter input would allow you to narrow down the values based on what you search for (i.e. - let’s say you use the filter to search for “apples”, the filter would return however many apple value check-boxes exist to check off).

Have any of you ever heard of something like this? I know they have a module that does this for Views, but it doesn’t work for the Add / Edit pages, etc.