Rectangle menu bar icon: hide it or keep it

The right side of a Mac menu bar runs out of room faster than most people expect. A sync client, a VPN, a clipboard manager, a screenshot tool, and somewhere in that row a small rectangle icon that has not been clicked in weeks. The question is whether that slot is doing anything, and what happens to the app if the icon goes away.

Rectangle is a slightly unusual case, because it is a background app with no dock icon and no window that stays open. The status item is the only permanent visible entry point it has. That makes the decision more interesting than it looks: removing the icon removes the only surface the app presents, but it does not remove any of the behaviour people actually installed it for.

What the status item is actually for

Rectangle runs in the background. Keyboard shortcuts and drag-to-edge snapping work without any window on screen, so on a normal day the menu bar icon does nothing at all. Open it and there are five things behind it:

• The full list of window actions, so a position can be picked with the mouse instead of a shortcut.
• The Ignore app toggle, which unregisters Rectangle's shortcuts while the current app is frontmost.
• The entry point into Settings.
• The update check, which changes its label when a new build is waiting.
• View Logging, which appears in place of About when the menu is opened with the option key held down.

Once the shortcuts are memorised, the first item stops being used. The two that keep earning their place are Ignore app and View Logging, and both are occasional rather than daily. That is the honest basis for the decision.

View Logging deserves a note too, since it is hidden behind a modifier key and most people never find it. Holding option while the menu is open swaps the About item for the log viewer, and with that window open every window action prints the rectangle it calculated alongside the rectangle that resulted. When those two match but the window on screen did not move, the cause is almost always another app rather than Rectangle. That is the single fastest diagnostic this app offers, and it lives behind the icon.

Ignore app is worth understanding before deciding it is disposable. When an app is ignored, Rectangle unregisters its keyboard shortcuts from macOS while that app is frontmost, and registers them again when it is not. It exists for conflicts, where an IDE or a virtual machine claims the same key combination. For anyone whose day involves two or three such apps, the menu is not decoration, it is a control panel.

Turning the icon off

The setting is a single checkbox in the General tab of Rectangle's Settings window, labelled to hide the menu bar icon. Ticking it removes the status item immediately. Nothing else changes.

The stored value is public. In Rectangle's source the boolean is defined under the key hideMenubarIcon, and the bundle identifier is com.knollsoft.Rectangle. The same result can be produced from a terminal:

defaults write com.knollsoft.Rectangle hideMenubarIcon -bool true

Rectangle's own documentation notes that values written this way are read at launch, so the app has to be restarted afterwards.

The important part is what does not stop. Keyboard shortcuts stay registered. Drag-to-edge snapping keeps working. Todo mode keeps working. Plenty of resident Mac apps wire the icon and the feature to the same switch, so hiding the icon quietly disables a monitor or a background service. Rectangle does not work that way, which makes this a low-risk setting to change.

Command-dragging it out is not temporary

macOS lets some status items be dragged out of the menu bar while holding Command. Rectangle allows this: its status item is created with the removal-allowed behaviour.

What happens next catches people out. Rectangle observes its own status item visibility, and the moment the item disappears it writes hideMenubarIcon to true and posts a notification that ticks the corresponding checkbox in the Settings window. A gesture that felt like tidying up for the afternoon is now a stored preference. Restarting the Mac will not bring the icon back.

This explains a common report: the icon vanished, nobody remembers changing a setting, and the setting turns out to be changed. To undo it, untick the box in General, or write the same key back as false and relaunch.

Getting back in once the icon is gone

Because the status item is the only permanent entry point, the way back matters more here than with most apps. There are two documented routes.

Launching Rectangle again while it is already running is the first. macOS sends a reopen event, and by default Rectangle responds by bringing up the Settings window. Spotlight, the Applications folder, or Launchpad all work.

The second changes what that reopen does. The relaunchOpensMenu preference makes the same action open the menu instead of Settings:

defaults write com.knollsoft.Rectangle relaunchOpensMenu -bool true

That combination is worth noting: the icon stays off the bar, and the menu is still one launch away when Ignore app or the log viewer is needed.

One caution about the reopen route: it only behaves this way when Rectangle is already running. If the app is not running at all, launching it starts it normally, and whether the icon appears depends on the stored preference rather than on how it was launched. So a hidden icon plus a Mac that was restarted without Rectangle set to launch at login produces a confusing state, where nothing is on the bar and no shortcuts fire either. Checking the launch-at-login box in General before hiding the icon avoids that entirely.

There is also a URL scheme. Individual actions can be triggered with rectangle://execute-action?name=left-half, called from a shell as open -g "rectangle://execute-action?name=left-half". Rectangle publishes a long list of valid names covering halves, thirds, fourths, sixths, ninths, maximise, centre, and display movement. Ignoring an app has its own form, rectangle://execute-task?name=ignore-app, optionally with a bundle identifier. Between the reopen behaviour and the URL scheme, almost everything the menu offers has a path that does not require the icon.

The one trade-off worth thinking about: updates

Rectangle handles its own updates rather than going through the App Store. It uses Sparkle, the long-standing update framework for Mac apps, and there are two visible surfaces for it. One is the Check for Updates item in the menu, which relabels itself to say an update is available when a build is waiting. The other is the automatic check, which can be left on or off in Settings.

Hiding the icon removes the first of those. The automatic check still runs if it is enabled, and Rectangle is written to hold back a scheduled update prompt rather than throwing it in front of whatever is on screen, so a pending update can sit quietly for a while. Nothing breaks, but the manual "is there a newer build" glance is gone.

That matters more than it sounds, because several of the failure reports for this kind of app turn out to be fixed already. Builds released in 2026 addressed snapping not restoring after logout or sleep, and shortcuts not restoring after a user session switch. Both are exactly the symptoms people describe when they say the app stopped working. The current release is v1.100, published on 26 August 2026, and Rectangle supports macOS 10.15 and later.

The practical answer is not to keep the icon for this reason alone. It is to leave automatic checks enabled before hiding the icon, so that the surface being removed is not the only one.

If the icon stays, shorten the menu instead

Keeping the icon is a reasonable choice, and there is still something to tune. The number of rows in the menu is controlled by preferences rather than by the Settings window: one governs whether every window action is listed, another whether the additional size commands appear. Trimming them shortens the distance between opening the menu and finding the row that matters.

The icon's own width is not adjustable. Menu bar space is a shared resource that shrinks every time another resident app is installed, and on a MacBook with a notch the usable width is smaller still. Items that no longer fit are simply not drawn, which reads as a bug even though nothing has failed. Rectangle acknowledges the surrounding problem in a different place: it carries a screenEdgeGapTopNotch preference so the top gap can be set separately on a notched display, which exists partly for people running a menu bar replacement across several screens.

The notch case deserves a sentence of its own, because it produces a symptom that looks like an app fault. The number of status items a Mac can display depends on the physical width of the screen and, on recent MacBooks, on how much room is left to the left of the notch. Plug in an external display, change which screen is primary, or install one more resident app, and items that used to be visible stop being drawn. The apps behind them are still running perfectly. They are simply not reachable by clicking, because there is nothing to click. Anyone who has ever concluded that an app "quit by itself" after connecting a monitor has probably met this.

Here is how the three options compare.

Choice	Bar space	Menu actions	Cost to reverse
Hide the icon in Settings	Freed	Relaunch the app	One checkbox
Collapse it with a menu bar organizer	Freed day to day	Available from the collapsed group	Remove from the group
Leave it visible	Occupied	One click, always	None

Deciding with a count instead of a guess

Rectangle sits at the easy end of this decision, for three reasons that do not often appear together: the icon and the features are on separate switches, the hide setting is officially supported rather than a hack, and there are documented ways to reach the app without the icon. Many resident Mac apps offer none of those.

The split between hiding and collapsing comes down to usage. If shortcuts cover everything and Ignore app is never touched, hiding frees the slot outright. If apps get ignored regularly, or logs get checked when something misbehaves, keeping the menu reachable is faster in practice. A tool that hides menu bar icons on a Mac exists for exactly that middle case: the app stays resident and clickable, the bar stays short. What such tools can and cannot reach is set out on the features page, and the differences between approaches are on how it compares.

What to change first

Tick the hide setting in General and run for one week, counting the times the menu was actually wanted. Zero means leave it off. Two or three means put the icon in a collapsed group rather than back on display, and check Koffret for the setup questions that come up most often.