Rectangle app Not Working on Mac? Here’s How to Fix It

Rectangle mac depends entirely on macOS’s Accessibility API to read window positions and move them. When a shortcut does nothing, the cause is almost always one of three things: that permission has gone stale, another app is capturing the same shortcut, or a single app is misbehaving with resize commands. Work through these in order.

First, tell the two failure modes apart

Drag a window to a screen edge instead of using a shortcut.

• If the snap preview appears and the window moves, Rectangle app has Accessibility access and is running. The problem is specific to keyboard shortcuts, most likely a conflict with another app or a shortcut that got corrupted while being recorded.
• If nothing happens on drag either, the Accessibility permission itself is the problem, and the fixes below should be done in order from the top.

Quick fixes to try first

The project’s own README lists these before anything else, because they resolve most reports:

1. Lock and unlock your Mac. This clears a surprising number of cases, especially right after a macOS update.
2. Make sure macOS is fully up to date.
3. Restart the Mac, particularly if the problem started immediately after installing a system update.

Reset the Accessibility permission

macOS occasionally shows Accessibility permissions as granted while the underlying grant has gone stale, usually after a system update replaces or re-signs the app. The toggle looks switched on, but the permission it represents no longer works.

Fastest method, from Terminal:

tccutil reset All com.knollsoft.Rectangle

Manual method, if you’d rather not use Terminal:

1. Quit Rectangle.
2. Open System Settings > Privacy & Security > Accessibility.
3. Select Rectangle and disable it, then remove it entirely with the minus button. Do these two steps in that order — removing it while still enabled is what actually clears the stale grant.
4. Restart your Mac.
5. Launch Rectangle again and grant Accessibility access when it prompts you.

If you installed Rectangle with Homebrew and settings keep resetting even after this, reinstall with the --zap flag so old preference files are removed first:

brew uninstall --zap rectangle
brew install --cask rectangle

Check for a shortcut conflict

If snap areas work but a specific shortcut doesn’t, another frontmost app is likely registering the same key combination and intercepting it before Rectangle sees it. To isolate this:

1. Trigger the same action from Rectangle’s menu bar icon instead of the shortcut. If the menu action works, the shortcut itself is the problem, not Rectangle’s window-moving code.
2. Temporarily rebind the shortcut to an unused combination in Rectangle’s preferences and see if it starts working. If it does, the original combination is claimed by something else — check the frontmost app’s own shortcut settings.
3. If a specific app never responds correctly regardless of shortcut, use Ignore app for that app from the Rectangle menu, then set that app’s own window controls instead of fighting the conflict.

Also confirm no other window manager is running at the same time. Two apps registering Accessibility-based window control simultaneously — Rectangle alongside Magnet, BetterSnapTool, yabai, or similar — is a documented source of unpredictable behavior. Quit the other one while you diagnose.

One narrower case: some apps use secure keyboard entry (Terminal and password managers commonly do this) while a secure text field is focused, which blocks macOS from delivering any global keyboard shortcut, not just Rectangle’s, until focus leaves that field. If shortcuts fail only inside one specific input, this is worth ruling out before assuming Rectangle is broken.

Check the specific app, not just Rectangle

If one application resizes incorrectly while everything else works fine, the app itself is usually the reason. The most common documented example is iTerm2, which by default only resizes in increments of full character widths, so Rectangle’s calculated size and the window’s actual size can end up slightly different. Disable that behavior with:

defaults write com.googlecode.iterm2 DisableWindowSizeSnap -integer 1

Restart iTerm2 afterward.

Look at the debug log

Rectangle can show you exactly what it calculated versus what happened:

1. Hold Option while the Rectangle menu is open.
2. Choose View Logging… (it appears in place of the usual “About” item).
3. Repeat the action that isn’t working and watch the log.

If the calculated rectangle and the resulting rectangle match, Rectangle did its job and something else moved or resized the window afterward. If they don’t match, the problem is on Rectangle’s side, and the log is worth saving if you plan to open a GitHub issue.

A rare case: Notification Center freezing

A small number of users have reported Notification Center becoming unresponsive with Rectangle’s drag-to-snap feature enabled. The documented workaround is to disable “Snap windows by dragging” in preferences and rely on keyboard shortcuts instead. This does not affect most installations, but it’s worth trying if Notification Center specifically stops responding after installing Rectangle.

Still stuck

Two remaining steps, in the order the project recommends:

• Test in a new macOS user account. If Rectangle works correctly there, something in your main account’s configuration — another utility, a corrupted preference file, or a lingering permission — is the actual cause, not Rectangle itself.
• Open an issue on GitHub with your macOS version, Rectangle version, and a saved debug log. The Rectangle issue tracker is where the maintainer and contributors actually look; a saved log with a calculated-versus-resulting mismatch is far more useful than a description of the symptom alone.