Moom vs. Magnet vs Rectangle
The window manager is pretty basic on macOS (Ventura or higher). You can move the window to one of the sides, move it to another connected monitor, or send it to an iPad.
There are some tools to improve this. The ones I have tried are Moom, Magnet, and Rectangle. I can tell you in advance that they are very similar in how they intend to solve this problem.
macOS standard window controls
Let’s first see what macOS offers by default (Ventura or higher). If you hover over the maximize icon, you will see these options:
The first one is to enter full-screen mode using Mission Control. The next two move the window to one of the sides in full-screen mode, so it will ask you which other window you want to put on the other side. Finally, the last option allows you to move the window to another monitor (I have the window on my external monitor, so it offers me to move it to the integrated one of my laptop).
But this is not where the standard macOS functionality ends because if you press the Option key, you will see the following options:
As you can see, the first three options have been changed to do the same, but without Mission Control. Something that will be enough for many users: zoom the window, and move it to one of the sides, taking up half of the screen.
Moom
Moom offers snap-to-edge and snap-to-corner features, among other interesting options.
Also, when hovering the maximize button, it shows a tooltip:
Moom offers these options: maximize, move left, move right, move up, and move down.
So if you click on any of these options and then hover over the green icon again, you will see that an arrow option has been added:
This is the undo function, which restores the window to its previous position and size. Pretty handy!
Moom’s killer feature is in preferences. In the custom tab, you can define actions, including moving, zooming, growing, shrinking, etc. I will show you a couple of examples to resize the window to different sizes:
The first resizes the window to fit in a 72e second resizes to 1080p (Full HD). This is very useful for recording windows. Then when clicking the top bar icon, I get these actions as shortcuts:
That easy.
But that’s not all. Moom supports window layout snapshots. This means that it can record where each window is to restore it after a trigger. This trigger can be connecting a second display or just a keyboard shortcut. This feature makes this tool a compelling option.
Moom is priced at $10 and can be bought directly from the official website or the Mac App Store.
Magnet
I see Magnet as a snap-to-edge tool, taken to the limit.
It has a keyboard shortcut for every predefined action out of the box. It also supports snap-to-edge with the mouse.
And finally, it has three interesting options:
These three options are a bonus so we can maximize, restore, and center windows.
Magnet is priced at $10 and can be bought from the Mac App Store.
Rectangle
Rectangle is the latest tool I discovered and tried, and it looks very similar to Magnet. In fact, it’s free and open source. These are some of the shortcuts (because there are even more after unfolding a section below):
Similar to Magnet, there’s a keyboard shortcut for every action. It also supports snapping to the edges.
A more powerful version (Rectangle Pro) costs $10 and can be purchased from the official website.
Conclusion
To conclude, what are the fundamental differences? How to choose one?
All three are entirely equivalent, with no significant differences. So any of them will be a great choice.
If I have to choose, I recommend you try Rectangle because the free version is fully functional. If you want the extra features, the Pro version is the same price as the other apps, and you’ll already be used to it.
However, if all you need to do is resize windows to one half of the screen, or move them from one monitor to another, you don’t need an app. macOS already includes this functionality built-in. I encourage you to try it!
