The short version: When keyboard shortcuts work but dragging a window to a screen edge does nothing, snap areas are either turned off in Rectangle‘s settings or getting intercepted by macOS Sequoia’s own drag-to-tile feature. Check Rectangle’s snap area setting first, then switch off Apple’s native window tiling — between them, those cover nearly every case. The remaining causes follow.
What snap areas actually are
Snap areas are Rectangle’s drag zones: pull a window toward the left edge and a translucent preview shows it filling the left half. Corners produce quarters, the top edge maximizes. They’re the mouse-driven half of Rectangle, entirely separate from its keyboard shortcuts, and they can break independently — which is the insight that makes this easy to troubleshoot.
If shortcuts work fine and only dragging is dead, you can rule out Accessibility permissions completely. Invalid permissions would take out both. So this is a narrower problem with a much shorter list of suspects.
Cause 1: Snap areas are switched off
Begin here, since it’s the most frequent answer and costs fifteen seconds. Open the Rectangle app‘s settings from the menu bar icon and find the snap area option. If it’s off, nothing will snap on drag regardless of what else you change.
This gets disabled more often than you’d guess — sometimes on purpose during earlier troubleshooting, sometimes by someone trying to stop conflicts with another app who then forgot the change. Flip it back on, drag a window to an edge, confirm.
Cause 2: macOS Sequoia’s native tiling is competing
This is the modern flavor of the problem, and it didn’t exist before Sequoia. macOS now ships its own drag-to-edge tiling. With both Rectangle’s snap areas and Apple’s native tiling live, they’re watching for the identical gesture — a window dragged to a screen edge — and outcomes turn unpredictable. Sometimes macOS wins and you get its tiling instead. Sometimes neither fires cleanly.
The fix is choosing one. To have Rectangle handle drags, switch off macOS window tiling in System Settings under Desktop & Dock, where the drag-to-tile options live. With Apple’s version out of the picture, Rectangle’s snap areas behave normally again.
Prefer keeping native tiling for drags and using Rectangle purely for keyboard shortcuts? That’s a legitimate setup too — just disable Rectangle’s snap areas so nothing is competing, and you get a clean division of labor. Our comparison of Rectangle and native Sequoia tiling covers which to favor.
Cause 3: A conflicting window manager
Running two window managers simultaneously creates the same collision. If Magnet, BetterSnapTool, Moom, Loop, or anything comparable is still installed and running, it may be grabbing the edge-drag gesture before Rectangle ever sees it.
Scan your menu bar for other window management icons. If you’re trialing several apps, fully quit the ones you aren’t using — not merely disable their shortcuts, but quit them, because drag detection can stay live even with hotkeys off.
Cause 4: External monitors and display edges
Snap areas can behave oddly on multi-monitor setups, especially where two displays meet. Dragging toward the edge shared with another screen may move the window to that display instead of snapping, since you’re crossing into neighboring territory rather than hitting a true screen boundary.
That’s less a bug than ambiguity about your intent. If it’s causing friction in your layout, test the outer edges of your displays — the ones not adjacent to another screen — to verify snap areas work at all, then adjust your display arrangement or lean on keyboard shortcuts for the contested edges.
Cause 5: Rectangle needs a restart
Less common, but cheap to rule out. If snap areas worked earlier in the session and then stopped, quit Rectangle from its menu bar icon and relaunch. A stale process can lose track of screen geometry — particularly after plugging in or unplugging a display — and a restart re-establishes it.
Cause 6: Individual zones were reassigned or disabled
Rectangle configures snap areas per zone, so some can work while others don’t. If the left edge snaps but corners don’t, or the top does nothing while the sides are fine, an individual zone was probably disabled or reassigned rather than the whole feature failing.
Head back into the snap area settings and review each zone separately. This also catches the case where someone changed what a zone does — the drag registers fine, it’s just producing a different result than you expected.
Quick diagnostic path
Shortcuts work, no drags snap at all — Snap areas disabled, or macOS native tiling competing. Causes 1 and 2.
Nothing works, shortcuts included — Not a snap area problem; that’s Accessibility permissions.
Some zones work, others don’t — Individual zones disabled or reassigned. Cause 6.
Worked earlier today, stopped — Restart Rectangle. Cause 5.
Only broken on a second display — Display edge ambiguity. Cause 4.
Another window manager in the menu bar — Quit it. Cause 3.
Frequently asked questions
Whether you’re using Rectangle for Mac with keyboard shortcuts or its drag-to-snap zones, both methods make window management effortless. If you haven’t tried Rectangle yet, it’s a free open-source tool that transforms how you arrange windows on macOS.
Why aren’t Rectangle’s snap areas working?
The two most common causes are snap areas being switched off in Rectangle’s settings, and macOS Sequoia’s built-in window tiling competing for the same drag gesture. Check Rectangle’s snap area setting first, then disable Apple’s native tiling in System Settings under Desktop & Dock.
Does macOS Sequoia tiling conflict with Rectangle?
It can. Both listen for a window being dragged to a screen edge, so when both are active the results become unpredictable. Pick one to handle drags — either disable macOS tiling and let Rectangle do it, or disable Rectangle’s snap areas and use it for keyboard shortcuts only.
My shortcuts work but dragging doesn’t. Is that a permission problem?
No. If shortcuts work, Rectangle’s Accessibility permission is valid — invalid permissions would break both. A drag-only failure points to snap areas being disabled, a conflict with native tiling, or another window manager claiming the gesture.
Can I use Rectangle snap areas and macOS tiling together?
Not reliably, since they respond to the same gesture. The workable version is splitting duties: let macOS handle drag-to-tile while Rectangle handles keyboard shortcuts, with Rectangle’s snap areas turned off. Trying to run both drag systems at once causes the conflicts.