Rectangle Menu Bar Icon Missing? Here’s How to Get It Back

A specific, recurring problem shows up on Rectangle app‘s issue tracker: the app is clearly running — visible in Activity Monitor, sometimes even still working via keyboard shortcuts — but its menu bar icon is nowhere to be found, or accessing preferences becomes impossible once the icon is gone. This covers the real documented cases and what actually resolves each one.

If you deliberately enabled “Hide menu bar icon”

This is the simplest and most common cause, and it’s self-inflicted rather than a bug: Rectangle mac has a setting to hide its own menu bar icon, and once it’s hidden, there’s no icon left to click for settings. A real user question on the project’s own discussions board hit exactly this: after enabling the hide option, how do you get back in?

The fix: launch Rectangle app again while it’s already running. Opening the app a second time (from Finder, Spotlight, or a terminal command pointing at the app bundle) reopens the preferences window even with the menu bar icon hidden — it doesn’t launch a second instance, it surfaces the settings window of the one already running. From there, you can toggle the hide setting back off if you want the icon visible again.

If a menu bar management tool is involved

If you use a menu bar organizing tool (Bartender, Ice, or similar) that hides and reveals menu bar icons based on available space, Rectangle app‘s icon can end up tucked away in a hidden section rather than actually missing. Issue #1538 specifically describes a user running “Ice Menu Bar” who couldn’t get Rectangle app‘s icon to display after an update — check whether your menu bar manager’s overflow or hidden section actually contains the icon before assuming Rectangle itself is broken. A quick way to confirm: temporarily disable the menu bar manager entirely and see if Rectangle’s icon reappears in the normal menu bar.

If it happened right after an update

Issue #1337 describes a case where the menu bar icon disappeared specifically after an in-app update prompt was accepted, with the app subsequently not appearing in Activity Monitor’s application list (via Cmd+Option+Escape) despite apparently running, and not being closeable by normally dragging it to the Trash because macOS considered it still open. The reporter’s steps — restarting the Mac, fully shutting down, reinstalling, downloading older versions, and toggling Accessibility permissions off and on — didn’t resolve it, and they ultimately used a third-party uninstaller (CleanMyMac) to force a clean removal before reinstalling from scratch.

If a fresh reinstall after a botched update doesn’t bring the icon back through normal means, a full forced quit and clean removal is a reasonable escalation:

killall Rectangle
defaults delete com.knollsoft.Rectangle

followed by removing the app from Applications and reinstalling from a fresh download, rather than continuing to troubleshoot an installation that may be in a genuinely broken state from an interrupted update.

If the app never showed an icon, even on first launch

Issue #81, an older report, describes Rectangle appearing in Activity Monitor as running but with absolutely no icon anywhere — no menu bar, no Dock, no window — immediately after installation, with no combination of removing the preferences file or reinstalling changing the outcome. This is a rarer, more severe case than the “hidden after update” reports above. If you hit this specifically on a fresh install with no prior configuration to have gone wrong:

1. Fully quit any running instance via Activity Monitor (Force Quit if necessary).
2. Remove the preferences file: defaults delete com.knollsoft.Rectangle.
3. Reinstall from a fresh download rather than a cached installer file, in case the original download was corrupted.
4. If it persists across a clean reinstall on the same Mac, this is worth reporting on the current issue tracker with your specific macOS version, since a persistent zero-UI launch on a clean install is unusual enough to warrant a fresh look rather than assuming it’s a known, already-explained issue.

A related but distinct problem: Bartender interfering with snap detection

Separately from the icon-visibility issue, issue #910 documents a different Bartender-related problem: Rectangle’s debug log showed it detecting “Bartender 4” as the window under the cursor during a drag-to-snap action, rather than correctly identifying the actual window being dragged — causing the resize to apply incorrectly. This is a window-detection conflict during active use, not a missing-icon problem, but it’s worth knowing about if you use Bartender and see snap actions behaving unpredictably specifically during drags rather than the icon being invisible.

Quick diagnostic checklist

1. Check View → toggle “Hide menu bar icon” is off, or relaunch Rectangle to reach settings even if it’s currently hidden.
2. Check any menu bar management tool’s hidden/overflow section before assuming the icon is actually gone.
3. If it broke right after an update, try a full killall + preferences delete + clean reinstall rather than continuing to troubleshoot the possibly-corrupted existing installation.
4. If it’s broken from a fresh install with zero prior configuration, that’s the rarer and more serious case — a clean reinstall is still the first step, but if it persists, it’s worth reporting directly rather than assuming a known fix exists.