Rectangle not working on Mac: what to check

The shortcut does nothing. Or it worked until the last macOS update and then stopped. Or it works everywhere except one app, which stubbornly refuses to sit in a third of the screen. These are three different faults with three different causes, and treating them as one problem is why people end up reinstalling an app that was never broken.

There is an order that saves time. Check permission, then conflicts, then residency, then the other app's own limits. Permission first because nothing else can work without it. Conflicts second because they are the most common cause once permission is fine. The other app's limits last, because that category is not a fault at all.

Start with accessibility permission

Any app that moves windows belonging to other apps needs macOS accessibility permission. Without it Rectangle launches, stays resident, and does absolutely nothing when a shortcut is pressed. No error appears, which is what makes this look like a broken app rather than a missing checkbox.

The permission lives in System Settings, under Privacy & Security, then Accessibility. A tick in that list is not proof that it is working. After a macOS upgrade, or after replacing the app bundle, the entry can be present and stale at the same time. Rectangle's documentation gives a specific repair sequence, and the order inside it is called out as important:

1. Quit Rectangle.
2. In System Settings, Privacy & Security, Accessibility, first disable Rectangle with the toggle.
3. Then remove it from the list with the minus button. Doing both, in that order, is the part that matters.
4. Restart the Mac.
5. Launch Rectangle and grant the permission when prompted.

The same reset is available from a terminal:

tccutil reset All com.knollsoft.Rectangle

Before any of that, Rectangle lists three quick fixes that resolve a surprising share of reports: lock and unlock the Mac, make sure macOS is up to date, and restart. The documentation singles out lock and unlock as especially effective right after a system update.

Check the version before spending time on anything else. Rectangle shipped fixes in 2026 for snapping not restoring after logout or sleep, and for shortcuts not restoring after a user session switch. Those are precisely the symptoms behind "it stops working after lunch". The current release is v1.100, published on 26 August 2026, and Rectangle supports macOS 10.15 and later.

The menu test splits the problem in half

With permission confirmed, the next question is whether the shortcut is reaching Rectangle at all. There is a one-step way to find out: open Rectangle's menu bar menu and run the same action from there.

• Works from the menu, not from the keyboard. The feature is fine. The problem is shortcut registration.
• Fails from the menu too. The shortcut is irrelevant. Look at permission or at the target app.

That single test eliminates half the search space, and skipping it is why people reinstall apps that were working. If the answer points at the keyboard, three things are worth checking in order.

Another window manager is running. Two apps competing for the same key combination means one of them never sees it. Rectangle's own troubleshooting list includes making sure no other window management app is active. This is the single most common cause once permission has been ruled out, and it is easy to miss when the other app was installed months ago and hides its own icon.

The frontmost app claims the same keys. IDEs, virtual machines, and remote desktop clients all define large shortcut sets. Rectangle has a purpose-built answer: the Ignore app toggle in its menu, which unregisters its shortcuts from macOS while that app is frontmost and registers them again when it is not. Reaching for that is usually less work than rebuilding a shortcut scheme around the conflict. It can also be triggered without the menu, through rectangle://execute-task?name=ignore-app with a bundle identifier.

The log says what actually happened. Hold option while opening Rectangle's menu and About is replaced by View Logging. With that window open, every action prints the rectangle it calculated next to the rectangle that resulted. Rectangle's guidance is blunt about how to read it: if the calculated rect and the resulting rect are identical and the window still did not move, something else on the Mac is interfering.

When one app refuses to fit

A window that will not shrink into a third or a sixth is usually not a bug. Apps can declare a minimum window size, and nothing outside the app can override it. Rectangle documents the arithmetic with an example: a window with a minimum width of 600 points cannot fit a 504-point third of a display. When that happens, Rectangle keeps the window on screen and briefly shows a message that the window size was limited.

It is worth knowing that the message is deliberate. Rather than leaving a window half off screen or silently ignoring the command, Rectangle keeps the window visible and tells you it clamped the result. So a brief on-screen note after a thirds command is a correct outcome being reported, not an error.

The options are the ones you would expect. Use a larger layout such as halves, or shrink the neighbouring window by hand. Rectangle also allows the minimum size limits it applies to be adjusted, including disabling them, though that does not change what the target app will accept.

Two other cases produce a similar "one app is different" feeling.

Terminal emulators can resize only in whole character cells by default, so the result lands a few pixels off. Rectangle documents the setting that turns that behaviour off in iTerm2.

Some apps enable the macOS AXEnhancedUserInterface accessibility mode, which can make window frames calculate incorrectly. Rectangle disables the mode during its own window operations, and there is an enhancedUI preference with three modes that changes whether it is restored afterwards. Mode 1 always restores it, which is the right choice when assistive software depends on it. Modes 2 and 3 leave it off, which suits people who noticed Chromium browsers becoming sluggish.

Notification Center, and settings that will not stick

Two symptoms have causes that sit outside the window logic entirely.

If Notification Center freezes, Rectangle's documentation links the report to drag-to-snap and offers a direct workaround: uncheck the option for snapping windows by dragging. It affects a small number of setups. For anyone who only uses keyboard shortcuts, turning it off costs nothing.

If settings reset every time the app restarts, the place to look is the install route rather than the Settings window. Rectangle stores its configuration through NSUserDefaults at ~/Library/Preferences/com.knollsoft.Rectangle.plist. When Rectangle was installed with Homebrew and preferences do not persist, the documented fix is to uninstall with the zap flag and reinstall:

brew uninstall --zap rectangle
brew install rectangle

For moving a working configuration to another Mac, or rebuilding a broken one, Settings has import and export buttons that write JSON. Rectangle will also load a config file placed at ~/Library/Application Support/Rectangle/RectangleConfig.json at launch, then rename it with a timestamp so it is not read again. One caveat: shortcuts have been stored in a different format since v0.41 and will not load into older builds.

Two symptoms that are really configuration

A pair of complaints turn up often enough to be worth naming, because in both cases the app is behaving exactly as configured.

The first is repeated shortcuts producing an unexpected size. Rectangle cycles through sizes when the same shortcut is pressed again, and how it cycles is a setting. The subsequent-execution behaviour can resize in place or move across monitors, and the set of sizes in the cycle is editable. Someone who chose the across-monitor behaviour during first launch and forgot will read a window jumping to a second display as a fault. It is a menu selection in the General tab.

The second is windows that will not stay put after being moved manually. Rectangle can restore a window to its previous size when it is dragged away from a snapped position, which is helpful until it is not. That restore behaviour has its own preferences, including one for restoring after a size change rather than only after a drag. Both are documented as terminal settings rather than checkboxes, so they are easy to inherit from an old configuration file and hard to find later.

The general lesson applies beyond this app. When a resident tool does something surprising but consistent, the cause is far more often a stored preference than a defect. Consistency is the tell: real faults tend to be intermittent, configuration is not.

Some things are missing rather than broken

Before troubleshooting, confirm the behaviour exists. The clearest example is moving a window to another desktop or Space. Rectangle states that Apple never released a public API for it, that Rectangle Pro has next and previous Space actions, and that there are no plans to add them to Rectangle. Nothing is failing. There is simply nothing to bind.

Launch at login is the other one. The General tab has a launch-at-login checkbox, and if it is off, then after a restart the app is not resident and no shortcut can possibly fire. Anyone whose complaint is shaped like "only broken first thing in the morning" should check that box before touching permissions.

The order, on one page

Step	Where to look	What it settles
1	Lock and unlock, macOS updates, Rectangle version	Whether it is a stale system state
2	Accessibility: disable, remove, restart, re-grant	Whether permission is actually live
3	Run the action from the menu	Shortcut problem or feature problem
4	Other window managers, frontmost app shortcuts	Whether something is competing
5	Option-click the menu, View Logging	Whether calculation and result agree
6	Target app minimum size, enhanced UI mode	Whether the other app is the limit

What resident apps have in common here

Read enough of these reports and a pattern shows up. Almost every genuine fault in this category is permission, conflict, or the target app's own limit. Very few are the app's own settings going bad, because Rectangle keeps display and behaviour on separate switches and publishes the preference keys.

What lengthens the diagnosis is the rest of the bar. Clipboard managers, screenshot tools, key remappers, and window managers all touch keyboard input or accessibility permission, and when half of them are hidden it becomes hard to say what is even running. Being able to see the full list of resident apps at a glance is worth more during troubleshooting than any single setting. What a menu bar manager for macOS can reach is set out on the features page, and current system requirements are on download.

What to change first

Run the menu test before anything else, because it decides which half of the problem to work on. If it points at permission, do the disable-then-remove sequence in full rather than just toggling the checkbox, and check Koffret for the questions that come up most often when several resident apps share the same permissions.