Rectangle v0.97 to v0.99: Every Change in the Latest Updates

Following on from the changes covered in v0.95 and v0.96, this goes through what actually shipped in the three releases after that — verified directly against the project’s own release notes rather than summarized from memory. If you’re running an older build, this is what you’re missing.

v0.97

  • Ordering adjustment for screensOrderedByX now uses a display’s horizontal midpoint (midX) for the calculation — a refinement to the multi-monitor display-ordering logic covered elsewhere in this series, aimed at making Next/Previous Display behave more predictably in non-trivial monitor arrangements.
  • A defaults toggle for disabling unsnap restore of smaller/larger commands — giving control over whether using Make Smaller or Make Larger on a snapped window automatically triggers a restore-adjacent behavior.
  • A «Skip gap on top screen edge» checkbox added directly to Settings, addressing a specific complaint about gap settings behaving inconsistently at the top of the screen — related to, though not necessarily the same root cause as, the top-edge gap issues covered in the dedicated article on pixel-precision complaints.
  • Half-Split ratio applied consistently to corner actions and snap areas — fixing a case where a plain half-screen action and a corner or snap-area action could previously calculate the split point slightly differently for what should be an identical boundary.
  • Anchor clamped windows to the snap edge instead of leaving a gap, and align clamped windows to snap edges by default — the fix, covered in more detail in the article on apps like Discord and Spotify that enforce a minimum window size, for windows that can’t reach their full calculated size being left floating with an unwanted gap rather than pushed flush against the edge.
  • A «Cooperative Window Resizer» feature, contributed alongside the clamped-window fixes.
  • Execute window actions when the window ID is unavailable — a resilience fix for a specific internal failure mode where an action would previously do nothing if Rectangle app couldn’t resolve a window’s ID through the usual path.
  • Performance fix for the Snap Area preferences tab loading slowly.

v0.98

A narrow, single-purpose release: it fixes a regression where side-split ratios for side actions (left/right/top/bottom half) had stopped starting at exactly 1/2 as they had before v0.97. This is a useful reminder that even a well-tested open-source project occasionally ships a fix in one release that needs a follow-up correction in the next — v0.97’s split-ratio consistency work introduced this specific regression, and v0.98 exists specifically to correct it.

v0.99

The largest of the three, with contributions from several first-time contributors:

  • A Settings toggle to keep window size when moving a maximized window to another display — previously, moving a maximized window to a different display via Next/Previous Display would presumably resize it to that display’s full dimensions; this setting lets you preserve the original size instead.
  • A hover badge and switcher for stacked windows — the direct follow-up to the overlap-offset feature from v0.96, covered in detail in the dedicated article on that feature. This is the «hover count badge» idea the maintainer referenced when merging the earlier overlap-offset PR, now actually shipped.
  • Restore shortcuts after user session switches — a fix for shortcuts not surviving a Mac being switched to a different user session and back.
  • Prevent Todo shortcuts from firing during shortcut recording — stopping an unintended interaction where attempting to record a new custom shortcut could accidentally trigger a Todo Mode action instead.
  • Invalidate the event tap CFMachPort in ActiveEventMonitor.stop() — a lower-level technical fix related to how Rectangle mac listens for system events, aimed at preventing a specific class of resource-handling issue rather than a user-facing behavior change.
  • Allow zero to disable minimum window size limits — giving more direct control over Rectangle app‘s own minimum-size enforcement, distinct from an individual app’s own enforced minimum (the Discord/Spotify-style limitation covered elsewhere), which Rectangle app still can’t override.
  • Clear omitted shortcuts when importing a config, and reapply shortcuts when restoring current defaults — two related fixes to how importing a saved configuration or resetting to defaults handles shortcuts that aren’t present in the new configuration, so leftover bindings from a previous setup don’t linger unexpectedly.
  • Allow «smaller» to shrink the height of a vertically maximized window — extending the Make Smaller action to correctly handle a window that’s been maximized specifically along its height.
  • Preserve relative window position when moving to another display — keeping a window’s proportional placement consistent when it’s moved across displays of different sizes, rather than resetting to a default position on the new display.
  • Honor defaults write customizations for JSONDefault keys — a fix ensuring Terminal-based customizations aren’t silently overridden by values baked into Rectangle app‘s own JSON defaults.
  • Eliminate portrait eighth-snap gaps on displays whose height is not divisible by 4 — a narrow but specific pixel-precision fix for a particular display-height/eighths-grid interaction on portrait-oriented monitors.
  • Bound the overlap-offset scan and offset maximized windows too — extending the v0.96 overlap-offset feature (covered in its own dedicated article) to also apply to maximized windows, with a bound added to prevent the detection scan from running unnecessarily wide.
  • A small interface change: the ellipsis button in the General tab is now labeled «Extras» instead of being unlabeled.

What this pace of updates tells you

Three releases in relatively close succession, several with first-time external contributors, is a reasonable signal of an actively maintained project rather than one coasting on an old codebase. If you’re troubleshooting a specific pixel-precision or multi-monitor issue and find an old, unresolved-looking report from a year or more ago, it’s worth checking whether one of the specific fixes above — half-split ratio consistency, clamped-window anchoring, relative-position preservation across displays — already addresses it before assuming the behavior is permanent.

Checking your version against this list

Open Rectangle’s menu bar icon and check About (without holding Option) for your current version number, then compare against the GitHub Releases page to see whether you’re missing any of the fixes described here, and to check for anything that’s shipped since this article was written.