Rectangle App: A Windows Management for Mac OS

Unlike Windows OS, which provides built-in window functions and helps you manage your windows at the desktop. You can snap and resize your windows by dragging them to the edges of the desktop or pressing hotkeys. Especially in Windows 11, you can hover your cursor on the Maximum button of the top right corner of the window to organize them directly. In Mac OS, there is not any built-in feature to let you snap and organize your windows. But luckily, there are still a lot of third-party tools that would help you do that. In this article, I will introduce Rectangle [1] and how it works in Mac OS.

You can resize and snap your window by hovering at the cursor above the maximize button on the top right corner in Windows 11.

Credit from the official website of Rectangle

Rectangle is an open-source app [2] which was written by Swift. And it was implemented and designed based on Spectacle [3]. Basically, you can use hotkeys to snap and resize your windows. The most features I use every day are “Center the window” and “Almost maximize window”. You can define the hotkeys by yourself. For me, I set “Ctrl+Option+C” for the first one, and “Ctrl+Option+A” for the second one.

You can define hotkeys by yourself

Snap Window

You can also drag your window to the edge of the desktop for a while to trigger snapping windows feature. Drag your window to the left and right sides to snap it to there and resize as half of width. Drag your window to the top to snap it there and maximize your window, but not enter the full screen.

Drag the window to the edge area to trigger snapping feature

Rectangle also has a paid version; you can pay $9.99 to upgrade the pro version. It provides lots of useful features including iCloud sync-up. The one of paid feature I would like to point out is that you can press and hold “Ctrl+Cmd” and there will be an overlay to let you choose how to resize or snap the window. You may consider purchasing the pro version if you are not able to recall the hotkeys usually.

Credit by the official website of Rectangle.

You may have more tools you would like to use. Please let me know which one is your favorite one and share below!

Reference

[1] Rectangle (rectangleapp.com)

[2] rxhanson/Rectangle: Move and resize windows on macOS with keyboard shortcuts and snap areas (github.com)

[3] Spectacle (spectacleapp.com) (no longer being actively maintained)