What Is Hookshot? The Name Behind Rectangle Pro, Explained

Anyone who has dug into Rectangle mac Terminal-based settings has run into a small piece of trivia: Rectangle Pro actual application bundle identifier is com.knollsoft.Hookshot, not anything containing “Pro.” This is not a leftover typo. Hookshot is a real, separate name that Rectangle mac own creator, Ryan Hanson, has referred to directly in his own comments on the project GitHub discussions.

What Ryan Hanson has said about it directly

In a GitHub discussion about custom window sizes (discussion #517), the maintainer states plainly: “there is 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.”

In a separate, earlier discussion (discussion #362) about the same general request, he links directly to his own explanatory post on Medium about how the custom-dimension feature works.

So is Hookshot the same thing as Rectangle Pro?

Based on the maintainer own description — a paid superset of shortcut builder with a custom shortcut builder for dimensions and docking — Hookshot matches the functional description of what is marketed today as Rectangle Pro. The bundle identifier still used by the current Rectangle Pro app is consistent with Hookshot being the app original or internal name.

Why this matters practically

If you are troubleshooting Rectangle Pro through Terminal commands, several defaults write commands specifically use com.knollsoft.Hookshot in place of com.knollsoft.Rectangle — a detail covered in the article on Rectangle hidden Terminal settings. If you copy a command for the free app and run it against Rectangle Pro without swapping the bundle identifier, it will silently do nothing.

The takeaway

Hookshot is not a mysterious separate product or an abandoned side project — it is the internal name still visible in Rectangle Pro bundle identifier, tied directly to the paid app custom-shortcut and custom-dimension features as described by Rectangle own creator.