Uninstalling Completely, Including the Shortcuts That Keep Working Afterwards

What a normal uninstall leaves behind

Quitting and dragging to the Trash removes the executable and nothing else. Four artefacts survive, and each produces a different confusing after-effect.

The full sequence

Order matters. Remove the permission while the app still exists, because the privacy list identifies entries by application, and clearing a grant for something already deleted is harder than it should be.

# 1. stop it
killall Rectangle 2>/dev/null

# 2. clear the Accessibility grant (Pro: com.knollsoft.Hookshot)
tccutil reset Accessibility com.knollsoft.Rectangle

# 3. remove preferences
defaults delete com.knollsoft.Rectangle 2>/dev/null
rm -f ~/Library/Preferences/com.knollsoft.Rectangle.plist

# 4. remove support files, including any pending config import
rm -rf ~/Library/Application\ Support/Rectangle

# 5. remove the application
rm -rf /Applications/Rectangle.app

# 6. reboot

On a Homebrew installation, use the zap flag so the cask's own knowledge of the associated files is used rather than doing it manually:

brew uninstall --zap rectangle

The shortcuts still do nothing in other apps

The genuinely puzzling case, and a reported one: the application is gone, but Control-Option-J and its neighbours are still swallowed — other applications never see them. It looks like the software left something running.

Work through these in order:

1. Reboot. Global hotkey registrations belong to a running process. If any instance was still alive when you deleted the bundle, its registrations persist until the process ends. This resolves most cases on its own.
2. Check for a surviving process. <code>pgrep -lf Rectangle</code> after the reboot. Anything returned is being launched by something — a login item, a launch agent, or a second copy elsewhere on disk.
3. Search for other copies. <code>mdfind -name Rectangle.app</code> finds copies in Downloads, on a second volume, or in a user Applications folder.
4. Look for launch agents. <code>ls ~/Library/LaunchAgents/</code> and check for anything with a matching identifier.
5. Confirm it is not a different app. Once the combinations are free, something else may claim them. Test with the log window of whatever else you have installed, or with the conflict method from the shortcuts guide.

pgrep -lf Rectangle
mdfind -name 'Rectangle.app'
ls -la ~/Library/LaunchAgents/ | grep -i knollsoft
launchctl list | grep -i knollsoft

Migrating rather than removing

If you are uninstalling to try something else, do it in this order to avoid a period where two managers fight over the same keys: export your configuration, uninstall completely with the sequence above, reboot, then install the replacement. Overlapping the two produces intermittent failures in both and makes it impossible to judge the new one fairly.

If you are leaving because of a specific fault, it is worth checking the diagnostic guide first — a large share of the reasons people abandon a window manager on macOS are permission-database problems that survive a switch and reappear with the new tool a week later.

Questions