Why switch from Spectacle to Rectangle

In every single post I’ve seen where someone asks which apps they should install on their new mac, one of the first suggestions is a window manager. Rectangle is increasingly mentioned (thanks!), but I still see Spectacle users that say they have no reason to switch. If Spectacle does it for you, that’s awesome — it’s a great app, but there are some concrete reasons to go with Rectangle, even outside of a direct feature comparison.

Apple Silicon

As of v0.38, Rectangle is available as a universal binary that runs on both Intel and Apple Silicon. Currently the only way to get Spectacle running on Apple Silicon without Rosetta is to compile the app yourself. Even if someone else took up the torch and released and hosted a universal binary of Spectacle, the odds of bugs getting fixed in Rectangle are higher since it’s written in Swift.

Notarization (Security)

Spectacle stopped being maintained before Apple started enforcing app notarization. Notarization is how you know that the app you’ve downloaded is the one that I’ve notarized with my developer id and without malware as long as you get it from the GitHub repo (rectangleapp.com downloads also point to GitHub). It is not likely that you’re going to go download a malware infested version of Spectacle from an unofficial source, but if somehow you did end up with one then there is a lot of damage that could be done. In order for a window manager app to work on macOS, you need to give that app accessibility privileges. Among other things, an app with accessibility privileges has the potential to log keystrokes.

Features

Rectangle has all but a handful obscure pieces of functionality in Spectacle, and is as close as you’re going to get to a drop-in replacement.

I purposely keep Rectangle really slim on features. At this point, I typically only let in features that are transparent to users unless they seek them out, which is why a lot of features are toggled via command line. I have also only added features requested by a lot of users. The main feature that is in Rectangle but not Spectacle is dragging windows to screen edges to snap them. Feel free to comb through the readme for more.

Try it out!

Spectacle’s an awesome app that I’m lucky to be following the footsteps of with Rectangle. Give Rectangle a try, it’s free!