What Is Hookshot? The Name Behind Rectangle Pro, Explained

Anyone who’s dug into Rectangle mac‘s Terminal-based settings has run into a small piece of trivia: Rectangle Pro’s actual application bundle identifier is com.knollsoft.Hookshot, not anything containing «Pro.» This isn’t a leftover typo — Hookshot is a real, separate name that Rectangle mac‘s own creator, Ryan Hanson, has referred to directly in his own comments on the project’s GitHub discussions, and understanding what it actually refers to clears up otherwise-confusing references you’ll run into if you read through Rectangle app‘s community history.

What Ryan Hanson has said about it directly

In a GitHub discussion about custom window sizes (discussion #517), responding to a request for the free app to support arbitrary custom-dimension shortcuts, the maintainer states plainly: «there’s my paid superset of custom window dimensions, Hookshot, that has a custom shortcut builder where you can specify window dimensions and where the windows are docked.» He describes it as also supporting different window dimensions and locations on repeated presses of the same custom shortcut, and being able to assign custom shortcuts to directional actions within the main app.

In a separate, earlier discussion (discussion #362) about the same general request, he links directly to his own explanatory post — «Custom Window Dimension Shortcuts in macOS», published on Medium — as further reading on how the custom-dimension feature works.

So is Hookshot the same thing as Rectangle Pro?

Based on the maintainer’s own description — a paid superset of window shortcut builder with a custom shortcut builder for dimensions and docking — Hookshot matches the functional description of what’s marketed today as Rectangle Pro. The bundle identifier com.knollsoft.Hookshot still used by the current Rectangle Pro app is consistent with Hookshot being the app’s original or internal name, later marketed under the Rectangle Pro branding to align it more clearly with the free Rectangle app it’s built on top of. This is a reasonable inference from the naming evidence rather than an explicit «Hookshot was renamed to Rectangle Pro» statement quoted directly from the maintainer — if you want it confirmed in those exact terms, that’s worth asking directly in the current Rectangle Pro community repository.

Why this matters practically

If you’re troubleshooting Rectangle Pro through Terminal commands, several of the defaults write commands documented for Rectangle Pro specifically use com.knollsoft.Hookshot in place of com.knollsoft.Rectangle — a detail covered in the dedicated article on Rectangle’s hidden Terminal settings. If you copy a command intended for the free app and run it against Rectangle Pro (or vice versa) without swapping the bundle identifier, it will silently do nothing, since you’re writing a preference for an app that isn’t actually installed under that identifier.

A useful side effect of digging into this history

The two discussions cited above are also a good example of a pattern worth knowing about if you’re a free Rectangle user hoping for a specific advanced feature: custom, pixel-precise window dimensions with a shortcut builder is a feature that has existed in the paid app (whether called Hookshot or Rectangle Pro) for years, predating some of the feature requests asking for it in the free app. If you find yourself wanting arbitrary custom sizes rather than Rectangle’s fixed catalog of halves, quarters, and thirds, checking whether Rectangle Pro already covers your specific request — since apparently it has for a long time — is worth doing before assuming it’s an unmet need in the ecosystem entirely.

The takeaway

Hookshot isn’t a mysterious separate product or an abandoned side project — it’s the internal name still visible in Rectangle Pro’s bundle identifier, tied directly to the paid app’s custom-shortcut and custom-dimension features as described by Rectangle’s own creator. If you see the name referenced in an old discussion thread, a Terminal command, or a bundle identifier, it’s pointing at the same app currently sold as Rectangle Pro.