What's new in MacZones.

A batch of Rectangle-style window commands — maximize by height or width, almost-maximize, jump to a third — plus a click-to-snap grid right in the menu bar and a one-click rescue for windows stranded off-screen.

New

• Maximize Height and Maximize Width. Ctrl+Option+H fills the screen vertically and Ctrl+Option+W fills it horizontally, each keeping the window’s position and size on the other axis — so a tall editor can run floor-to-ceiling without changing its width, and a wide timeline can span the screen without changing its height.
• Almost Maximize. Ctrl+Option+M centers the window at about 90% of the screen, leaving a uniform border all the way around — nearly full-screen without losing the desktop behind it.
• First, Center, and Last Third. Snap the focused window to a full-height left, center, or right column. These ship unbound so they don’t collide with your existing chords — assign keys in Settings → Shortcuts.
• Restore Last Position. Ctrl+Option+Delete sends the focused window back to exactly where it was before your last snap. It’s a one-step undo, remembered per window, so an accidental snap is always one keystroke from reversed.
• Snap from the menu bar. Click the menu-bar icon and choose Snap Focused Window… for a clickable mini-map of the current display’s layout, plus quick buttons for halves and maximize. Arrange a window by clicking a zone — no shortcut to remember.
• Gather Stray Windows. Unplugged an external monitor and lost a window somewhere off-screen? One menu click pulls every stranded window back onto your active display, sized to fit.

Resize a split by dragging the seam between two windows, snap to the screen edges without a layout, cycle a window through halves and thirds with one key — and keyboard snapping now works on Chrome, Slack, and VS Code.

New

• Drag the seam to resize snapped windows together. A slim handle floats on the boundary shared by two snapped windows. Drag it and both sides move as one — one grows while the other shrinks — so you can fine-tune a split right on screen instead of opening the editor. The change is live-only: your saved layout is untouched, and the original split comes back when you switch layouts, change displays, or restart. Turn the handles off in Settings if you’d rather not see them.
• Drag a window to a screen edge to snap it. Magnet/Rectangle-style edge snapping. Drag a window to the side, top, or a corner of the screen — no modifier key needed — and it snaps to a half or a quarter, independent of whatever zone layout you have set.
• Size-cycling shortcuts. New directional hotkeys walk a window through ½ → ⅓ → ⅔ of the screen along an edge on repeated presses, hugging that edge — so a single key reflows a window to the width you want without reaching for the mouse.

Improved

• Smarter keyboard stepping. A floating window now snaps cleanly into the layout on the first directional press, instead of only stepping when it’s already aligned to a zone. And stepping past the last zone on a display now spills the window onto the physically-adjacent display, so repeated presses walk it across monitors continuously.

Fixed

• Keyboard zone actions on Chrome, Slack, and VS Code. Chromium/Electron apps build their accessibility tree lazily and often leave the “focused window” attribute unset, so a snap hotkey could silently do nothing on them. MacZones now falls back through the main window and the app’s window list — the same source the drag path uses — so the right window is found every time.

Window snapping now works on Slack, Chrome, and VS Code — including on external monitors and once those apps have content loaded.

Fixed

• Drag-to-snap on Electron apps with content loaded. 1.1.2 fixed the snap overlay for empty Chromium windows, but the moment Slack, Chrome, or VS Code had a page or workspace open they switched to handling the title-bar drag internally — the window’s frame isn’t committed to WindowServer until you release the mouse, so every “did the window move?” check read zero and the overlay never appeared (most noticeably on a second monitor). MacZones now recognizes a window drag from where you grab it — the title-bar band — instead of waiting for motion, and identifies the grabbed window through WindowServer rather than accessibility focus, which lags when you reach across to another display. In-canvas Shift drags in Photoshop, Figma, and Illustrator stay unaffected, since those start down in the content area.
• Keyboard snapping no longer silently fails on those apps. Chromium-based apps leave an accessibility flag enabled that makes macOS clamp or drop window move and resize commands, worst on a secondary display — so a snap hotkey appeared to do nothing. MacZones now suppresses that flag for the duration of each move and verifies the window actually landed where you sent it, retrying once if it didn’t.

Drag-to-snap now works on Electron apps (Slack, Chrome, VS Code), and the diagnostics exporter no longer hangs the app on managed Macs.

Fixed

• Drag-to-snap on Electron windows. A guard added in 1.1.1 to keep the overlay from popping up over in-canvas Shift drags (Photoshop, Figma, Illustrator) waited for the focused window’s accessibility position to move before showing the overlay. Chromium-based apps don’t refresh that value until the drag ends, so Slack, Chrome, VS Code, Discord, and similar apps fell through silently. MacZones now also reads the window’s live position directly from WindowServer, which updates as soon as the window does — so dragging those apps with the snap modifier held finally lights up the overlay and snaps on release.
• Export Diagnostics no longer freezes the app. The exporter ran synchronously on the main thread and accumulated the log file with O(n²) string concatenation. On work Macs with MDM agents intercepting filesystem operations, that could hang the UI long enough to take the app down under macOS’s unresponsive-app watchdog. The export now runs in the background with an “Exporting…” indicator and Export/Report Bug buttons disabled while it’s running. Log collection is capped at 10,000 lines so an app that’s been running for days can’t balloon memory.

Bind layouts to Mission Control Spaces, and the snap overlay finally honors the accent color you picked.

New

• Per-Space layout bindings. Settings → Spaces lets you pair a layout with a specific Mission Control Space on a specific display. Swipe between Spaces and the bound layout swaps in automatically — useful if Space 1 is “coding,” Space 2 is “writing,” and you want different zone arrangements without juggling profiles. Toggle the feature off in the same pane to keep one layout across every Space.

Fixed

• Snap overlay now uses your accent color. The overlay used to render in system blue regardless of the custom accent picked in Settings → Appearance. It now actually uses the color you chose — for the zone fills, borders, the selected-zone checkmark, and the multi-zone bounding box.

Switch layouts with a single chord, see what just changed, and find any shortcut you’ve set without scrolling.

New

• Direct “switch to layout” shortcuts. Open Settings → Shortcuts and bind a chord to any specific layout. Pressing it swaps the focused display straight to that layout — no cycling, no menus.
• Layout HUD. A small floating card flashes on the affected display whenever the active layout changes, showing the new layout’s name and a grid preview. Fires both for the new direct chord and the existing Ctrl+Opt+L cycle so you always know what your keys did.

Improved

• Searchable Shortcuts pane. The Shortcuts settings tab now has a search field that matches action names, group names, and bound chords — type ctrl opt 1 to jump straight to whatever owns that shortcut.
• Bound-only filter. A toggle next to the search field hides every row that doesn’t yet have a chord assigned. Useful for auditing what you’ve actually wired up.
• Collapsible sections. Each group of shortcuts can be folded shut from its header; collapsed state persists across launches. Searching auto-expands sections so matches stay visible.

If MacZones still did nothing when you opened it on a fresh Mac — no menu bar icon, no window, no sound — this build is the actual fix.

Fixed

• Silent crash on first launch. 1.0.0 through 1.0.2 had a packaging bug that caused the app to crash before it could draw anything on every Mac other than the one we built on. The 1.0.1 and 1.0.2 patches each chased a different “nothing happens” symptom; 1.0.3 fixes the underlying cause — a resource-bundle path that resolved correctly only on our build machine.

Apologies it took three releases to find. Thanks for the patience.

A follow-up to 1.0.1. If the welcome window appeared behind your other apps on first launch, this build puts it back where it belongs.

Fixed

• First-launch window comes forward. The Accessibility prompt and Layouts editor now reliably surface on top of whatever you were doing when you opened MacZones — not hidden behind your browser or the DMG window.

A reliability release. If 1.0.0 ever looked like it “didn’t open,” this build fixes it.

Fixed

• Universal binary. 1.0.0 shipped Apple Silicon–only by accident. 1.0.1 runs natively on Intel Macs too.
• Visible on launch. Status-bar apps don’t get a Dock icon by default, which made MacZones look like nothing happened the first time you opened it. The Layouts editor now opens automatically on launch so you can confirm the app is running.
• More reliable window surfacing. Onboarding and the editor now reliably come to the front on macOS Sonoma and Sequoia, where the underlying activation API silently changed.

Under the hood

• Sparkle’s updater now initializes after the first window is on screen, so an update-system hiccup can no longer prevent the app from starting.
• Added startup logging so a future “app won’t open” report can be diagnosed from Console.app without a crash log.

MacZones 1.0 is here. A precise, keyboard-driven tiling utility for macOS. Quiet by default, sharp when you reach for it.

New

• Drag to snap. Hold ⇧ while dragging to surface zone overlays on every display. Hold ⌃ alongside to span adjacent zones.
• Hotkey grid. Move the focused window between zones, displays, and layouts with ⌃⌥ + a key. Every chord is rebindable.
• Per-display profiles. Layouts bind to physical displays by UUID and switch automatically as monitors come and go.
• Session save & restore. Snapshot every window in every app, then put them back exactly. Survives reboots.
• Layout editor. Drag, resize, duplicate, and name zones on a canvas. Save layouts, share them across displays, start from templates.
• 14-day free trial with no card required. One-time license at $9.99.

Under the hood

• Native universal binary, ~4 MB. No Electron, no telemetry, no account.
• Hardened runtime, notarized, sandbox-friendly. Updates itself quietly in the background.
• Requires macOS 14 Sonoma or later and the Accessibility permission.