Automatically losing focus on an App every time

[milo-pa]

• This is a new bug that hasn't been documented in a closed issue or in the Readme.

Apple Books opens, is briefly interactive for half a second, then loses focus back to the previously focused app every launch/switch. Apple Books never quits, but it is functionally impossible to interact with the app as a result. Fully uninstalling Rectangle (with AppCleaner) and revoking its Privacy & Security > Accessibility permission and removing it as a Login Item resolved it. This issue only occurred with Apple Books, and persisted for a few weeks.

Troubleshooting steps that did not fix it (conducted in this order):

1. Clearing caches and restarting iBooks
2. Turning off Rectangle
3. Restarting Mac
4. Updating Rectangle from whichever version it was on ~two years ago to 0.98
5. Updating Mac from 15.7.1 to 15.7.9

macOS version: 15.7.1 / 15.7.9
Hardware: Macbook Pro 2021
Rectangle version: 0.9? / 0.98
Logs: rectangle_logs.txt

Logs pulled with log show --predicate 'process == "Rectangle" OR subsystem CONTAINS "knollsoft"' --last 7d since the Rectangle logs were empty after complete uninstall

[rxhanson]

Thanks for the detailed report.

There isn't any functionality in Rectangle that could lead to this, so I suspect that there is something else that was causing it. Even if Rectangle had functionality to do this, it would not be able to do it while it is not running.

Is there something else that you changed or stopped running when the issue went away?

[milo-pa]

Thanks for the quick response! I don't think I changed anything else and I don't have any other other apps that move windows.

I also forgot to mention that I also cleared Rectangle as a login item in addition to completely wiping and removing Accessibility Permissions. I found this apple discussion that might be a similar class of issue?

Either way, love Rectangle. Even after Apple finally added native window tiling, yours was still better.

[rxhanson]

Thanks for the additional info. Based on what I understand, I'm still pretty confident that we're not looking at a problem where Rectangle is the root cause.

As mentioned, if Rectangle is not running then there isn't a way that it could interfere with application focus. In order to isolate the issue to Rectangle, we'd want to see it happen with Rectangle running, and simply quit Rectangle without changing anything else and notice that it's not happening. If that is the case, then with Rectangle running you'd want to let the Rectangle logs run and see what gets logged by Rectangle. In the Rectangle menu bar menu, hold the option key and select View Logging.