Rectangle’s Next Display Shortcut Blocked by a Fullscreen App? Here’s Why

A specific multi-monitor edge case, documented in one of Rectangle app‘s oldest still-relevant reports (issue #51), affects anyone running three or more displays with a native fullscreen app on one of the displays in between: Next Display can get stuck, unable to move a window past the fullscreen app to reach the display beyond it.

The exact scenario reported

Three displays arranged horizontally — call them 1, 2, and 3 — with display 2 showing an app in native macOS fullscreen. A normal, non-fullscreen window sits on display 1, and the goal is to move it to display 3, skipping over display 2 entirely.

Pressing Next Display moves the window from display 1 to display 2 as expected — but because display 2 is occupied by a fullscreen app, the window effectively lands hidden behind it rather than becoming visible there. Pressing Next Display again, expecting it to continue on to display 3, does nothing. The shortcut effectively gets stuck rather than continuing its journey across the remaining displays.

Why this happens

A native fullscreen app occupies its own Space rather than existing as an ordinary window on that display — a distinction covered in more depth elsewhere in this series. From Rectangle mac‘s perspective, «display 2» and «the fullscreen app’s Space currently shown on display 2» aren’t quite the same target, and the reporter’s own description is that Rectangle app doesn’t automatically detect this and continue the cycle to the next physical display, the way the discontinued Spectacle app apparently did in the same scenario, per the original reporter’s comparison.

The maintainer’s response, and what it means for current versions

Per the discussion on the issue itself, the maintainer didn’t reject the idea, describing it as something they weren’t opposed to adding but hadn’t prioritized, and suggested that a contributor could relatively easily implement it by detecting whether a target display is running a fullscreen app and skipping to the next one if so. Given how old this specific issue is, and that it remained more of an open enhancement request than an actively worked bug at the time, the safest approach is to check the issue’s current status directly rather than assume this behavior remains unfixed in whatever version you’re running today — an old open issue on a project’s tracker isn’t a permanent guarantee that nothing has changed since.

How to work around it if you hit this today

1. Move the window to the fullscreen display’s neighbor manually first. Rather than relying on Next Display to skip over the obstruction automatically, use Mission Control or a manual drag to reposition the fullscreen app itself, or temporarily exit its fullscreen mode, clearing display 2 as an obstruction.
2. Reduce reliance on native fullscreen on a display you need to route windows through regularly. If a specific display is consistently host to a fullscreen app that blocks your Next Display shortcuts, keeping that app in an ordinary maximized window (via Rectangle app‘s own Maximize instead of native fullscreen) sidesteps the issue entirely, since Rectangle app‘s Next Display action works normally on ordinary windows regardless of how large they are.
3. Move directly rather than cycling one step at a time, if your setup allows it. A more recent Rectangle feature — moving a window to a specific display by number rather than only stepping to the next or previous one — avoids the sequential-cycling problem altogether, since it targets the destination display directly instead of walking through the displays in between. Check whether your installed version includes this capability before relying on the workaround above.

Why this is a narrow edge case, not a common complaint

This specific interaction requires three conditions simultaneously: three or more displays, a fullscreen (not just maximized) app on a display physically between your source and destination, and reliance on the step-by-step Next/Previous Display shortcut rather than a direct by-number move. Most multi-monitor setups with two displays, or setups that don’t run fullscreen apps on the «in-between» display, won’t encounter this at all — it’s included here specifically because it’s a real, documented behavior worth knowing about if your own setup happens to match the exact scenario, not because it’s a widespread issue.