Rectangle is, genuinely, one of the best free apps you can install on a Mac. If you work across multiple monitors and haven’t already set up keyboard shortcuts to snap windows to halves, thirds, or corners, you’re spending more time dragging than you need to. It’s free, open-source, and handles window placement with almost no friction. No wonder it’s the first thing most people reach for when they set up a new Mac.
But Rectangle users with two or more monitors often hit a wall that has nothing to do with window management: the Dock keeps appearing on the wrong screen.
What Rectangle actually does
Rectangle intercepts window placement. When you hit a shortcut or drag a window to a snap zone, it resizes and positions that window — moving it between screens, snapping it to halves or quarters, filling specific regions. It’s excellent at this.
What it doesn’t do — and was never designed to do — is control the macOS Dock. That’s not a limitation or an oversight. Rectangle is a window manager. The Dock is a separate system component, and where it appears is controlled by a completely different macOS mechanism.
Why the Dock jumps screens in the first place
macOS decides which display shows the Dock based on where your cursor is. Specifically: when you move your mouse to the bottom edge of any screen and pause there, macOS reads that as a signal to move the Dock to that display. It’s cursor-proximity detection, built into the system, and entirely independent from where your windows are or what tiling app you use.
This is why Rectangle can’t fix it. Rectangle repositions windows — it has no way to intercept the cursor event that triggers the Dock to shift displays. Even if you tile every window perfectly with Rectangle shortcuts, the moment you accidentally graze the bottom of your secondary monitor, your Dock migrates.
For most users, this is genuinely disorienting. Your primary workflow is on your main screen, your Dock disappears, and you’re hunting for it on a monitor you barely use.
What DockSolo does differently
DockSolo solves exactly this problem, and nothing else. It doesn’t touch window management, and it doesn’t modify the Dock itself — no appearance changes, no Dock settings altered.
What it does: it runs silently in the menu bar and uses a system accessibility feature to intercept cursor movement events before they reach the bottom edge of displays where you don’t want the Dock. When your cursor approaches the bottom of a non-pinned screen, DockSolo clamps the position so the Dock trigger never fires. The Dock stays put. That’s what the required Accessibility permission is for — it enables this low-level cursor interception.
The setup takes about a minute — pick which display you want the Dock pinned to, grant the Accessibility permission, and you’re done. It runs as a login item with no Dock icon of its own, so once it’s configured you stop thinking about it. There’s one edge case worth knowing: if you physically disconnect your pinned display while the app is running, DockSolo falls back to the main screen. It won’t automatically re-pin when you plug back in — just open the menu bar icon and reselect your preferred screen.
DockSolo requires macOS 13 Ventura or later, it’s a one-time purchase with no subscription, and it needs periodic internet access for license validation — there’s a 24-hour offline grace period. It’s a Universal Binary, so it runs natively on Apple Silicon and Intel alike.
Two tools, one solved setup
The “Rectangle vs DockSolo” framing falls apart once you understand what each tool actually does. Rectangle manages where your windows go. DockSolo manages where the Dock stays. They live on completely different layers of macOS and don’t conflict.
Most multi-monitor Mac users who care about their setup run both — Rectangle for window placement, DockSolo for Dock placement. If you already have Rectangle and the jumping Dock is the one thing still bothering you, DockSolo is the last piece. Download it at app.dicta.to/download/docksolo.