Quad

Rectangle for Windows — keyboard-driven window tiling.

Features | Installation | Quick Start | Development | Architecture

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Overview

Quad is a window tiler for Windows modeled on macOS Rectangle: snap windows to halves, thirds, and quarters, maximize / center / restore, cycle sizes by repeating a shortcut, move windows across monitors, and drag a window to a screen edge to snap it.

The window-management engine is native Rust (Win32 via the windows crate; global hotkeys via tauri-plugin-global-shortcut). The app's window — a settings screen, a visual shortcut guide, click-to-apply layouts, and status — is a React UI rendered in WebView2 by Tauri 2. It lives in the system tray. Settings and the log live in %APPDATA%\Quad\.

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Features

• Tiling shortcuts — halves, thirds, quarters, maximize, center, with size-cycling on repeat (Left Half walks ½ → ⅔ → ⅓, just like Rectangle).
• Drag-to-edge snapping — drag a window to an edge → half, a corner → quarter, the top → maximize, with a translucent teal preview that snaps on release.
• Mission Control — one shortcut opens Windows Task View (all windows on the current desktop + the virtual-desktop strip).
• Multi-monitor — move a window to the next / previous display, preserving its relative size and position.
• Restore — remembers each window's pre-tiling geometry and brings it back.
• Click-to-apply — click any layout in the UI to apply it to your last active window.
• Live rebinding — rebind every shortcut from the settings screen; conflicts (e.g. Ctrl+Alt+Arrow claimed by Intel graphics) are detected and flagged.
• Frameless custom chrome — the dark UI runs edge to edge with its own draggable title bar, while keeping native resize, Aero Snap, and double-click-to-maximize.

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Installation

Download a build

Every push to main builds a portable quad.exe and an installer via GitHub Actions and publishes them to the latest release. They're also attached as artifacts on each workflow run.

Platform	Asset	Notes
Windows x64	quad.exe	Portable — run it directly; it starts in the system tray.
Windows x64	Quad_0.1.0_x64-setup.exe	NSIS installer.

Windows: the binaries are unsigned, so SmartScreen may warn on first run — choose More info → Run anyway. Quad uses the Microsoft Edge WebView2 runtime (preinstalled on Windows 11 and most updated Windows 10).

Build from source

See Development.

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Quick Start

1. Run quad.exe (or the installer). Quad starts in the system tray — the offset-tile mark with the teal accent tile.

2. Snap the focused window with a shortcut (Ctrl+Alt mirrors Rectangle's Ctrl+Option):

   Action	Shortcut
   Left / Right Half	Ctrl+Alt+← / → (repeat to cycle ½ → ⅔ → ⅓)
   Top / Bottom Half	Ctrl+Alt+↑ / ↓
   Quarters	Ctrl+Alt+U / I / J / K
   First / Center / Last Third	Ctrl+Alt+D / F / G
   Maximize · Center · Restore	Ctrl+Alt+Enter · Ctrl+Alt+C · Ctrl+Alt+Backspace
   Next / Previous Display	Ctrl+Alt+Win+→ / ←
   Mission Control	Ctrl+Alt+M

3. Or drag a window to a screen edge / corner to snap it.

4. Open the window from the tray (or click any layout there to apply it to your last window), and rebind anything in Settings — all bindings are editable, or via %APPDATA%\Quad\settings.json.

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Stack

Layer	Choice
Shell & packaging	Tauri 2
Native engine	Rust 2021 — windows 0.58, tauri-plugin-global-shortcut 2
UI	React 18 · TypeScript 5 · Vite 5
Styling	Tailwind 3 · Framer Motion 11 · Aceternity UI components · JetBrains Mono
Settings & autostart	serde_json + winreg (HKCU Run)

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Development

Prerequisites

• Rust (stable, MSVC toolchain) and Node.js 20+.
• The Microsoft Edge WebView2 runtime (preinstalled on Windows 11 / updated Windows 10).

Commands

git clone https://github.com/lzitser23/quad.git
cd quad
npm install            # Tauri CLI
npm --prefix web install   # frontend deps

npm run tauri dev      # hot-reloading dev window
npm run tauri build    # portable quad.exe + NSIS installer in src-tauri/target/release
cargo test --manifest-path src-tauri/Cargo.toml   # the pure engine's unit tests

A plain cargo build runs in dev mode (loads the Vite dev URL). Production builds must go through the Tauri CLI (npm run tauri build) so the frontend is embedded.

Project Structure

quad/
|-- src-tauri/   # Rust engine: layout, winmgr, hotkeys, ipc, tray, state, native
|-- web/         # React + Tailwind + Framer Motion UI
|-- docs/adr/    # architecture decision records
|-- .github/     # CI: build the portable on merge to main
`-- CONTEXT.md   # domain glossary

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Architecture

The engine is a pure core under a thin imperative shell: src-tauri/src/layout.rs computes every tiling rect (halves/thirds/quarters, size-cycling, snap zones) as pure value transforms with no Win32, so the geometry is unit-tested directly; winmgr.rs resolves the foreground window and its monitor, calls layout, and applies the result with SetWindowPos. Hotkeys, the IPC contract, the tray, and shared state each live in their own module; the React UI talks to Rust through #[tauri::command]s and emit events, mirrored in web/src/lib/.

• CONTEXT.md — the domain glossary (Action, work area, snap zone, hotkey spec…) and the module map.
• docs/adr/ — architecture decision records: the Tauri/Rust choice, the pure-layout split, the hotkey-spec seam, and the Mission Control → Task View mapping.

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Acknowledgments

• Rectangle — the macOS app Quad is modeled on.
• Tauri and the windows crate.
• Aceternity UI — UI components.