Moom vs. Magnet vs Rectangle

Although window tiling has been introduced in macOS Sequoia, it is a function that is still basic, in addition to displaying an animation that is not to everyone’s liking.

There are some tools that replace this feature. 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 Sequoia window tiling

Let’s first see what macOS Sequoia supports by default. If you hover over the maximize icon, you will see these options:

In the “Move & Resize” section we can see 4 icons to resize the window in half and move it to one side.

In the “Fill & Arrange” section there are another 4 icons:

• Maximize the window (without going into full screen mode).
• Move the window to the left, putting the next window below it to the right.
• Move the window to the left, putting the next two windows below it to its right.
• Resize the window and the next three windows below it to a quarter of the screen, moving each one to a corner.

In “Full Screen” are the options to move the window to the left or right, and maximize it, in full screen mode.

And finally, if you have an external monitor connected, there is an option to move the window to that monitor. In my case I had the window on my external monitor, and macOS offers me to move it to the laptop’s built-in monitor.

If you hold down the Option key, you will see some options change:

One aspect to take into account is that, by default, macOS leaves a margin between windows. If you want to remove it, you must disable the “Tiled windows have margins” option, which you can find in System Settings / Desktop & Dock.

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 Sequoia already includes this functionality built-in. I encourage you to try it!