Spectacle Is Discontinued — Here’s Why Rectangle Is the Replacement
Spectacle Is Discontinued — Here’s Why Rectangle Is the Replacement
Spectacle’s own GitHub repository carries a notice from its developer, Eric Czarny, stating the project stopped receiving active maintenance after nearly a decade of on-and-off development. The notice explicitly recommends Rectangle app as an open-source alternative. This isn’t a rumor or a community guess — it’s the stated position of Spectacle’s own author, posted directly on the project’s page.
What “discontinued” actually means here
The source code remains public and downloadable, and Spectacle will keep running on whatever Mac it’s already installed on. What stopped is active development: no more bug fixes, no more compatibility updates for new macOS releases, and no one maintaining the notarization and signing that Apple now requires of distributed Mac software.
That last point matters more than it sounds. Apple started enforcing app notarization — a process that verifies an app’s binary hasn’t been tampered with and comes from a registered developer — after Spectacle’s development had already wound down. Rectangle mac‘s creator, in a post specifically addressing this comparison, frames notarization as a guarantee that what you download from the GitHub releases page is exactly what he built and signed, with nothing injected in between. Since any window manager needs Accessibility permission to move windows — permission that, in principle, could also let a malicious app watch keystrokes — that verification chain is not a minor detail for this specific category of software.
The Apple Silicon problem
Spectacle has no official build for Apple Silicon. It runs under Rosetta 2 translation, and per its creator’s own migration notes, the only way to get it running natively on an M-series Mac is to compile it yourself from source. Rectangle app, by contrast, has shipped as a universal binary — native on both Intel and Apple Silicon — since version 0.38. For anyone on a current Mac, this is the most concrete practical reason to switch: Rosetta translation isn’t guaranteed to keep working forever, and Apple has already signaled it as a transitional layer, not a permanent one.
Feature gap: what you’d actually lose
According to Rectangle app‘s own creator, Rectangle app covers nearly everything Spectacle does, with only a handful of obscure Spectacle features left out — deliberately, as part of keeping Rectangle’s visible feature set minimal by default. The one clearly documented feature Rectangle has that Spectacle never did is drag-to-edge snapping: dragging a window to a screen border or corner to resize it, rather than relying purely on keyboard shortcuts. If your Spectacle workflow was keyboard-only, the transition is close to a drop-in replacement rather than a re-learning exercise.
Moving your shortcuts over
Rectangle includes a Spectacle-compatible shortcut mode, offered as a choice on first launch or from the Settings tab, that switches Rectangle’s default keybindings to match Spectacle’s. This means existing muscle memory — years of pressing the same combination for “left half” or “maximize” — carries over without you having to relearn or manually remap anything.
Practical migration steps:
- Install Rectangle from rectangleapp.com or via
brew install --cask rectangle. - On first launch, choose the Spectacle-compatible shortcut set when prompted (or switch to it later in Settings if you already picked Rectangle’s own defaults).
- Grant Accessibility permission under System Settings > Privacy & Security > Accessibility — the same category of permission Spectacle required, so this step won’t feel unfamiliar.
- Uninstall Spectacle once you’ve confirmed your usual shortcuts behave the way you expect. Running two Accessibility-based window managers at once is a common source of conflicts.
Should you keep using Spectacle anyway?
If you’re on an Intel Mac, staying on an older macOS version, and specifically prefer Spectacle’s exact behavior, it will likely keep working for a while — the source is still there, and nothing forces an uninstall. The risk grows with each new macOS release, since nobody is testing Spectacle against them, and it grows further if you eventually move to Apple Silicon, where you’re stuck with Rosetta or a self-compiled build. For anyone setting up a new Mac today, there’s no real argument for starting with an unmaintained app when a free, actively developed, near-identical replacement exists.