[ridv]

Rectangle (and spectacle before it) is one of those absolutely essential tools for me when working on my mac. I didn't realize how essential it was to my workflow until it was accidentally disabled a few days ago and I struggled hard to use my laptop.

Happily donated to the author of an app so essential for my day to day productivity to show my gratitude for making it and making it open source. If the author happens to read this: thank you!

[wyclif]

Also, you'd think Apple would natively support window tiling, but apparently their UX and desktop design philosophy is that they know best when it comes to window size and placement.

[rcthompson]

MacOS does support tiling. You can tile exactly one window across the entire screen by pressing the green button. If you want to tile more than one window, you can buy additional monitors.

(This is sarcasm.)

[runjake]

Wrong!

You can tile two windows. :-)

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204948

But yeah, I use Recrangle for my macOS tiling. I use it all day, every day.

Would love something that worked more like Pop!_os’ tiling, or perhaps i3’s.

[hulitu]

Strange. Is this new because AFAIK Windows was copied from MacOS and it had tiling at least from 3.0 ? Also in X window managers tiling was an old concept.

[ewzimm]

Windows 1.0 was tiling only. Overlapping windows were added in 2.0.

[kitsunesoba]

macOS window management philosophy is to not tightly manage windows, letting them live where they end up, not unlike papers on a desk. For occasions where windows need to be side by side and both fully visible (which at least for my workflow, isn’t all that often), they’re only loosely manually arranged that way.

It works for me at least. I have Moom installed for the occasions where I temporarily need tiling and that’s more than enough. Full tiling WMs on Linux give me a headache because with most of the programs I use, windows need to take up 70%+ of the screen to be usable which means the remaining space for other programs isn’t particularly useful, which defeats much of the purpose of full tiling.

[maxwell86]

macOS WM philosophy sounds like Outlook email philosophy: it should behave like paper mail.

Worst philosophy ever. Instead of figuring out how new technology enables better solutions to current problems, their philosophy is to emulate current solutions instead.

This is why I prefer gmail over outlook, and Linux over macos.

[Veen]

The mental model of windows having a consistent spatial location is deeply ingrained into MacOS because it's been done that way for decades. There are still old Mac users who complain that the Finder switched from a spatial model to a browser model.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2010/09/macos-x-beta/14/#b6

That's an old article, but Siracusa is still complaining about the "new" non-spatial finder to this day.

[kitsunesoba]

I’m not sure it’s so cut and dry. Workflows are highly personal things, so while something highly automated might work a charm for some while not working at all for others.

[aulin]

IIRC they recently added support for some half-assed tiling, only for two full screen windows side by side. It's called Split View.

[simongray]

Not recently, 6 years ago.

[hatmatrix]

Spectacle was my jam. Simple and free.

[colecut]

I thought rectangle was the next evolution of spectacle

[thamer]

It is, since Spectacle is no longer maintained. Rectangle is linked from the Spectacle README on GitHub: "Spectacle users have recommended Rectangle as an open source alternative."

https://github.com/eczarny/spectacle#important-note

[nemosaltat]

The Parallels Developer edition comes with a pretty great window snapping feature. Parallels was the only solution to run Windows on my M1 Mac. In addition to doing a great job at VMs, it comes with a bunch of handy utilities.

[dhosek]

I got Parallels in a bundle deal and was really aggravated by the fact that it kept popping up notifications to install additional utilities. Way uncool.

[mirekrusin]

Yes, so agressive, stopped using it because of it.

[aiisjustanif]

Is it the same developers. My main gripe is the complete change of key commands and the option to swap to Spectacle key commands is very limited.

[rxhanson]

Spectacle was created by a different developer. Rectangle contains nearly everything in Spectacle, and it includes an option when you first start the app or when you go to reset the default shortcuts to select the Spectacle shortcuts.

[awill]

it is. Spectacle is no longer supported.

[kaidon]

I still use Spectacle! Maybe I'll abandon it if I ever upgrade to Big Sur -- but it continues to work for me.

[wyclif]

Is the "Jordan Peterson" who is a Silver Tier supporter of Rectangle that Jordan Peterson?

[terinjokes]

Assuming you mean the one in the news, no. You can see on GitHub it's just a developer with the same name.

[fzil]

Usually people just make up names when they are donating. I’ve seen few Steve Jobs and Bezos around patreon.

[nickysielicki]

No, but in the realm of interesting Jordan Peterson facts, I recently learned that him and Jim Keller are brothers in law.

[dhosek]

I stumbled upon the fact that Michael Pollen (author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and many other interesting books) is the brother-in-law of Michael J. Fox.

[wyclif]

Yes. Keller was the lead engineer on the AMD K8 processor team, and the Apple A4 and A5 processors.