If you arrange a few windows a day and like doing it by hand, keep Rectangle — it's free, tiny, and excellent. If you're re-snapping the same windows all day, every day, you've outgrown snapping: ChainYourMac ($19.99, one time) maintains the layout for you on a scrolling strip where windows never resize each other.
What Rectangle is
Rectangle is a free, open-source window snapper — the most popular one on macOS, and deservedly so. Press a shortcut (or drag a window to a screen edge) and it snaps into halves, thirds, quarters, or custom fractions. It's tiny, rock-solid, needs no SIP changes, and does exactly what it says. There's also Rectangle Pro, a paid upgrade (~$10) that adds pinning, stashing, app-specific layouts, and more elaborate tricks.
Let's be clear: for a huge number of Mac users, Rectangle is all the window management they will ever need. If that's you, this page ends happily with you keeping it.
What a snapper doesn't do
A snapper executes one command on one window, then stops. Nothing remembers your arrangement. Nothing maintains it. Snap your editor left and your browser right — perfect. Now open Slack: it lands wherever it wants, covering both. You snap again. Open your mail, snap again. Come back from a meeting, windows have drifted, snap again.
Call it layout entropy: with a snapper, order is something you re-impose by hand, forever. That's not a flaw of Rectangle — it's the definition of the category. The moment it starts to feel like a chore is the moment you've outgrown the category, not the app.
What a scrolling window manager does instead
ChainYourMac is a window manager: it maintains the arrangement continuously. Every window has a place on an endless horizontal strip, at the width you gave it. New windows don't land on top of things — they slot in at the edge of the strip, and nothing else moves. Come back from that meeting and the layout is exactly as you left it, because keeping it that way is the app's whole job.
And unlike grid tilers (yabai, Amethyst), the strip never resizes your windows to fit newcomers. You navigate by scrolling — trackpad swipes with momentum, or vim-style shortcuts — with 120 fps spring animations, per-display strips, native Spaces support, and a full GUI for every setting.
The difference is starkest on a laptop. A 14-inch screen fits two comfortable windows, so snapping is a constant triage of which two deserve to exist. On the strip, every window stays full-sized and comfortable — your screen becomes a viewport onto a longer desk, and a two-finger swipe replaces the snap-shuffle-snap routine entirely.
ChainYourMac vs Rectangle, side by side
| Rectangle | ChainYourMac | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free (Pro ~$10) | $19.99 one time, lifetime |
| Category | Window snapper | Scrolling window manager |
| Maintains a layout | No — one-off snaps | Yes — continuously |
| New window opens | Lands anywhere; you snap it | Slots into the strip automatically |
| Window navigation | Not a feature | Yes — scroll, gestures, shortcuts |
| Windows resize each other | Only when you snap them | Never |
| Configuration | Simple preferences | Full GUI, live reload |
| Multi-monitor | Yes — manual snaps per screen | Yes — independent strip per display |
| macOS Spaces | Works alongside | Yes — strip per Space |
| SIP changes | No | No |
| Learning curve | Trivial | A few minutes — one new concept |
| Support | Community / GitHub issues | Direct email from the developer |
Which one should you pick?
Keep Rectangle if…
- you arrange windows a few times a day and enjoy the manual control;
- your workflow is one or two apps side by side, mostly static;
- free is the feature — honestly, many people should just keep Rectangle.
Choose ChainYourMac if…
- you're re-snapping the same windows all day and it's started to feel like tidying;
- you juggle many windows — especially on a laptop screen where only two fit at once;
- you want new windows handled automatically without your layout ever reflowing;
- you want to move between windows by swiping instead of hunting through Mission Control.
Snapper or manager isn't a rivalry — it's a stage. Rectangle is the right first tool, and for many people the last one they need. ChainYourMac is what the day-long window jugglers graduate to when tidying windows becomes the job instead of the fix.
FAQ
Is Rectangle really free?
Yes — Rectangle is free and open source, and it's rightly the most recommended window utility on macOS. There's also Rectangle Pro, a paid upgrade (around $10) that adds pinning, stashing, app-specific layouts, and more. ChainYourMac is a different category of tool: a scrolling window manager, $19.99 one time for a lifetime license.
What's the difference between a window snapper and a window manager?
A snapper like Rectangle moves one window when you ask — snap left, snap right, thirds — and then it's done; nothing maintains the arrangement. A window manager maintains the layout continuously: every window has a place, and new windows are placed automatically. A scrolling window manager like ChainYourMac does that on a horizontal strip where windows keep their size and you scroll between them.
Does Rectangle tile windows automatically?
No. Rectangle executes one snap per command — it never rearranges windows on its own, which is exactly why people like it: full manual control. If you find yourself re-snapping the same windows all day, that's the signal you've outgrown a snapper and want a manager that maintains the layout for you.
Can I use Rectangle and ChainYourMac together?
Let one tool own the layout. While ChainYourMac manages the strip, snapping a managed window with Rectangle fights the manager. You can keep Rectangle installed for floating windows you've excluded from tiling, but disable overlapping shortcuts and treat ChainYourMac as the owner of arranged windows.
Is ChainYourMac harder to learn than Rectangle?
A little, honestly. Rectangle is a handful of shortcuts you already understand. ChainYourMac introduces one new idea — your windows live on a scrolling strip — and most people internalize it in a few minutes of swiping. After that there's less to do than with a snapper, because the layout maintains itself.