Rectangle (and spectacle before it) is one of those absolutely essential tools for me when working on my mac. I didn't realize how essential it was to my workflow until it was accidentally disabled a few days ago and I struggled hard to use my laptop.

Happily donated to the author of an app so essential for my day to day productivity to show my gratitude for making it and making it open source. If the author happens to read this: thank you!

Also, you'd think Apple would natively support window tiling, but apparently their UX and desktop design philosophy is that they know best when it comes to window size and placement.

MacOS does support tiling. You can tile exactly one window across the entire screen by pressing the green button. If you want to tile more than one window, you can buy additional monitors.

(This is sarcasm.)

Wrong!

You can tile two windows. :-)

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204948

But yeah, I use Recrangle for my macOS tiling. I use it all day, every day.

Would love something that worked more like Pop!_os’ tiling, or perhaps i3’s.

Strange. Is this new because AFAIK Windows was copied from MacOS and it had tiling at least from 3.0 ? Also in X window managers tiling was an old concept.

Windows 1.0 was tiling only. Overlapping windows were added in 2.0.

macOS window management philosophy is to not tightly manage windows, letting them live where they end up, not unlike papers on a desk. For occasions where windows need to be side by side and both fully visible (which at least for my workflow, isn’t all that often), they’re only loosely manually arranged that way.

It works for me at least. I have Moom installed for the occasions where I temporarily need tiling and that’s more than enough. Full tiling WMs on Linux give me a headache because with most of the programs I use, windows need to take up 70%+ of the screen to be usable which means the remaining space for other programs isn’t particularly useful, which defeats much of the purpose of full tiling.

macOS WM philosophy sounds like Outlook email philosophy: it should behave like paper mail.

Worst philosophy ever. Instead of figuring out how new technology enables better solutions to current problems, their philosophy is to emulate current solutions instead.

This is why I prefer gmail over outlook, and Linux over macos.

The mental model of windows having a consistent spatial location is deeply ingrained into MacOS because it's been done that way for decades. There are still old Mac users who complain that the Finder switched from a spatial model to a browser model.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2010/09/macos-x-beta/14/#b6

That's an old article, but Siracusa is still complaining about the "new" non-spatial finder to this day.

I’m not sure it’s so cut and dry. Workflows are highly personal things, so while something highly automated might work a charm for some while not working at all for others.

IIRC they recently added support for some half-assed tiling, only for two full screen windows side by side. It's called Split View.

Not recently, 6 years ago.

Spectacle was my jam. Simple and free.

I thought rectangle was the next evolution of spectacle

It is, since Spectacle is no longer maintained. Rectangle is linked from the Spectacle README on GitHub: "Spectacle users have recommended Rectangle as an open source alternative."

https://github.com/eczarny/spectacle#important-note

The Parallels Developer edition comes with a pretty great window snapping feature. Parallels was the only solution to run Windows on my M1 Mac. In addition to doing a great job at VMs, it comes with a bunch of handy utilities.

I got Parallels in a bundle deal and was really aggravated by the fact that it kept popping up notifications to install additional utilities. Way uncool.

Yes, so agressive, stopped using it because of it.

Is it the same developers. My main gripe is the complete change of key commands and the option to swap to Spectacle key commands is very limited.

Spectacle was created by a different developer. Rectangle contains nearly everything in Spectacle, and it includes an option when you first start the app or when you go to reset the default shortcuts to select the Spectacle shortcuts.

it is. Spectacle is no longer supported.

I still use Spectacle! Maybe I'll abandon it if I ever upgrade to Big Sur -- but it continues to work for me.

Is the "Jordan Peterson" who is a Silver Tier supporter of Rectangle that Jordan Peterson?

Assuming you mean the one in the news, no. You can see on GitHub it's just a developer with the same name.

Usually people just make up names when they are donating. I’ve seen few Steve Jobs and Bezos around patreon.

No, but in the realm of interesting Jordan Peterson facts, I recently learned that him and Jim Keller are brothers in law.

I stumbled upon the fact that Michael Pollen (author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and many other interesting books) is the brother-in-law of Michael J. Fox.

Yes. Keller was the lead engineer on the AMD K8 processor team, and the Apple A4 and A5 processors.

I've been using https://apps.apple.com/us/app/magnet/id441258766?mt=12 with my ultra wide I got for work. I like that it lets me do things in thirds.

As a Linux to Mac adopter I also use Magnet. No relationship to company.

So does Rectangle. I'm using it right now on a 49" U/W, with this Firefox window on the right-hand third, VSCode in the center third, and Discord in the top-left 6th, and Dune (2021) playing in IINA in the bottom-left 6th :-)

All tied to global keyboard shortcuts too. Free, open source, and does exactly what you've asked for.

This sounds really nice… I’m now quite keen on looking into ultrawides.

Daily drove mac for 5-7 years after a childhood of tinkering with Linux installs (no professional development) and falling in love with an AwesomeWM setup with custom keybinds.

After getting into professional dev during / after high school I ended up using Divvy for an OSX window manager. It wasn’t fantastic, but I could set up custom keybinds and it was “reminiscent” of those tiling WMs I found so much love for as a pre-adolescent.

I recently (2ish years ago) switched from mac to a Debian then eventually Pop OS setup for my daily driver development environment. While not as robust as a custom arch setup with a tiling WM like awesome, Mutter is quite good and everything PopOS offers out of the box has been fantastic. Perhaps one of these days I will find the time to dive back into arch and configure a _truly_ efficient and customized workstation / dev env :-)

It’s interesting to see all of these alternative, perhaps even _better_ / more robust / more FOSS friendly mac WMs being listed here. I’m keen on giving them a try whenever I end up back on a mac workstation, but I cannot deny that my Divvy lifetime license has served me incredibly well for years, with support through many big OS upgrades.

Another alternative is yobai (+ skhd) https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai

I switched to it after having some issues with rectangle sending some of my windows into the abyss (way outside of the screen) which forced me to kill the app and restart it to get it back. But if Rectangle works for you that's good too, it's probably easier to configure.

yabai is the only alternative if you are used to i3wm or bspwm

Did you disable kernel security to inject the window server extensions? I don’t understand the repercussions so I’m a little reluctant to.

Same, and this really makes it a deal breaker for me in my company's MacBook pro.

You don't have to do that, it works without. Those are for addons I believe.

I've been v happy with Divvy for many years. It's not auto-tiling, but it's perfect for for my purposes. Quick cmd-shift-arrow puts a window in [top 1/2, bottom 1/2, left 1/2, right 1/2] or cmd-shift-enter [for fullscreen] (across 2 monitors)... it's exactly right for me to avoid ever reaching for the mouse to position windows.

Can you change workspaces without any animation (delay) with rectangle ? Or is just for tiling windows within a workspace ?

I've been using TotalSpaces 2 (https://blog.binaryage.com/totalfinder-totalspaces-future/) to change workspaces in macOS without the annoying animation which you cannot disable.

Too bad TotalSpaces 2 does not work with Monterey or M1 macs, so I am really looking for another solution that can enable this. I used to run skhd + yabai, but something about that did not click as good as with TotalSpaces 2.

Anybody know a solution for Monterey & M1 that you can use to switch between workspaces with the keyboard, without any delay ?

There is a beta-ish build (https://discuss.binaryage.com/t/can-we-help-test-total-space...) which works on Big Sur and M1, at least, (I haven't upgraded to Monterey yet.)

Thanks for sharing. Does not look like it's anywhere near production quality, but maybe it works just for transitioning between workspaces.

Seems there would be demand for such software based on the comments. For me at least TotalSpaces 2 has really changed how I use macOS, hopefully they will get it working on M1 & Monterey.

I'm using it daily, and while it does crash occasionally (but recovers fine after restart), all the features in TotalSpaces 2 seem to be there (including instant transitions and the overview). As a plus, it doesn't require SIP to be disabled anymore.

I have a feeling the problem of making it work was a bigger one than they expected, version 3 has been in the pipeline for a LONG time.

I use SizeUp for this: https://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/

I use rectangle with a 5k2k 40” ultra wide monitor and it’s awesome. Very flexible and customizable, and I highly recommended it. Did I mention it’s free and open source? :)

Which monitor? I'd been waiting for the LG (forever) and finally ordered the Lenovo, although my shipping updates keep changing. I'll have to try rectangle once it's here.

Hows the macOS support on these? I’m due a monitor upgrade and an ultra wide is where I’m leaning..

I can give you some insight here.

I've been using a Samsung C49RG9x (49" ultra-wide) on Windows 10 for about four months. It was absolutely the right move to shift from 2 or 3 1080p monitors to a single 49" ultra-wide unit.

Now I've switched back to using my 2020 13" MBP, and thus macOS, as my work horse. Long story short I had to use a previously bought "CalDigit Thunderbolt Station 3 Plus" (a dock, basically) to get the monitor to work correctly. This is because macOS cannot correctly render to the monitor over HDMI.

I don't know why this is (because I don't really know much about displays or display protocols - I don't care to neither) but I tried a few cables and adapters and it gave me an odd resolution (3840x1080 I think) and a pink tint over the whole display.

The CalDigit "dock" solved this as it exposes a Display Port (1.2) option to the Mac. The moment I plugged in the dock and then plugged the monitor into it via Display Port it worked flawlessly.

That being said I still had to go into the display settings in macOS and change the resolution from "Default for display" to "Scaled". It's at that point you can choose the correct "5120x1440" native resolution for the monitor.

I believe I'm getting a 120Hz refresh rate too.

I've been extremely happy combining the ultra-wide with macOS and using Rectangle (which replaces FancyZones on Windows 10 for me) to "tile" windows all over the place.

I hope this was helpful.

I have a CalDigit TS3 as well. I can't really explain why (for the same reasons you can't), but I could never get the right combo of cables to get 4K @ 60hz on 2 27" displays until using the dock-- and I've used a lot of cables, always buying the ones that claim to be the latest displayport/thunderbolt, whatever.

It's pretty annoying, but now I've got the dock every problem I've had has melted away. Woohoo!

I'll find out when it arrives!

Rectangle and its paid cousin, Hookshot (https://hookshot.app) are great. I use Hookshot.

They are the best window managers I've used on MacOS, because the resize features work flawlessly every single time. Other ones I've tried (e.g. bettertouchtool) have occasional issues with that.

They'd be perfect if they supported full customization of drop zones. They have some limited customization, including via the command line, but it's nothing compared to some of the other apps that are out there.

Hookshot does allow customization of the positions of the window throw (and long throw). You can create a custom shortcuts in the wrench and ruler tab, and then select the custom shortcut from the configure button for the window throw, at the end of the list. I realize this can feel a little hidden in the UI, so I'm planning on making it a little more straightforward in a future release.

The custom shortcuts in Hookshot are beyond what I've seen in most apps, especially since you can customize what happens in repeated executions of the custom shortcuts. Let me know what other apps out there have the customization that you are referring to.

Sorry just saw this. I actually already use keyboard shortcuts for some custom window positions. But I still usually just use the default snap zones because it's hard to remember the shortcuts.

BetterTouchTool goes a step further, and lets you customize the drop zones. I.e., if you drop a window on the top left, it snaps to your custom top-left position:

https://docs.folivora.ai/docs/104_snap_areas.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtgOseyyJ5U

Hookshot's performance is great but AFAIK doesn't let you snap windows to custom areas without keyboard shortcuts.

Amethyst is excellent, especially for multiple displays.

https://ianyh.com/amethyst/

Also check out https://highlyopinionated.co/swish/ for a gesture-based window manager by swiping on titlebars. It also features snake-selector keyboard shortcuts, so there's really nothing to memorize.

Disclaimer: I made this.

I use amethyst.

https://ianyh.com/amethyst/

All thumbs up for Rectangle. Taken me a while to memorize the various key maps, but they're pretty intuitive actually once you get the pattern. Memorizing those is key to really making the tool rock. I do a thirds a lot.

I recently started using MacOS. Rectangle is one the most useful apps I’ve come across… and free. I like that you can add padding to the windows. With keybind customization it’s a nice replacement for a tiling window manager.

Other window management options include Amethyst and Hammerspoon.

I highly recommend Hammerspoon for launching/focusing applications. Example from my config.

hs.hotkey.bind({"cmd", "alt", "ctrl", "shift"}, "F",

function() hs.application.launchOrFocus("iTerm") end)

I also use Karabiner-Elements to change capslock to cmd, alt, ctrl, shift.