flash

Flash and Rectangle

Rectangle is “a window management app for macOS based on Spectacle”: move and resize windows with keyboard shortcuts and snap areas, halves, thirds, quarters, maximize, and since 2.0 on-demand rows and columns. It is MIT Swift for macOS 14+, about 30,000 stars, very active (v2.0.3 in October 2026), with Accessibility as its only permission and a paid Rectangle Pro for layouts and sync. Its window verbs are the ones Flash’s window_move also offers.

	Rectangle	Flash
License, price	MIT, free; Pro paid	MIT, free
Platforms	macOS 14+ (v1.100 for 10.15 to 13)	macOS 14+
Permissions	Accessibility	Accessibility
Windows	Shortcuts and snap areas: halves, thirds, quarters, maximize, display moves, on-demand tiling, cycling	Named positions, proportional frames, placement rules by app and title, directional focus, minimize and restore, native full screen
Spaces	None (no public API)	None
Configuration	GUI; JSON import and export; rectangle://execute-action URLs	TOML, live reload, flash window_move CLI
Hints, modes, bar	None	Yes
Maintenance	v2.0.3, October 2026	1.0.0, October 2026

Where Rectangle is stronger

• Snap areas with the mouse, animations, cycling through sizes on repeated presses, and a GUI with every shortcut visible.
• Rectangle Pro adds whole-workspace layouts, stashing and iCloud sync.
• Thirds, sixths and display moves cover more positions out of the box.
• Older macOS through v1.100.

Where Flash is stronger

• Placement rules: a matching window is placed once when it appears, then left alone.
• Directional focus (window_focus --direction=left) and stack cycling, which Rectangle does not do.
• The same file holds hints, modes and the bar.

Flash features you might like

• window_move --position=lefthalf|righthalf|tophalf|bottomhalf|topleft| ...|maximized and --x=10% --y=10% --width=80% --height=80% (windows).
• window_minimize, window_restore, window_fullscreen --state=on.
• [windows.rules]-style placement by app and title, documented in windows.

Moving from Rectangle

Rectangle	Flash
⌃⌥← left half	"ctrl+alt+left" = ["flash", "window_move", "--position=lefthalf"]
⌃⌥→ right half	--position=righthalf
⌃⌥↩ maximize	--position=maximized
⌃⌥C center	--position=center
Thirds	--x=0% --width=33% and so on
Next display	Not available as a verb; mouse_screens moves the pointer
Snap areas	Not available
rectangle://execute-action?name=left-half	flash window_move --position=lefthalf

[mode.all.mappings]
"ctrl+alt+left" = ["flash", "window_move", "--position=lefthalf"]
"ctrl+alt+right" = ["flash", "window_move", "--position=righthalf"]
"ctrl+alt+return" = ["flash", "window_move", "--position=maximized"]

Both can run together if their shortcuts differ; many people keep Rectangle for snap areas and let Flash do the rest.

Checked 2026-10-14 against the Rectangle README.

This site is open source. Improve this page.