Troubleshooting

System Settings shows Orthant as enabled, but Orthant says permission is missing

This is not your mistake, and it has a specific cause. macOS ties the Accessibility grant to an app’s code signature, not to its name or its location. If a differently-signed build of Orthant has ever run on this Mac, macOS keeps a separate record for it, and the Accessibility list collapses both records into one row with one toggle. The row can show on while the copy you are running is genuinely ungranted, and toggling it does nothing.

Every released build is signed identically, so a .dmg install and a Homebrew install cannot produce this between them. You are most likely to hit it if you have also built Orthant from source and run that copy alongside an installed one.

To fix it:

  1. Quit System Settings entirely. The pane caches its state, and a reset performed underneath it shows stale results. This is the step people skip.

  2. Open Terminal and run:

    tccutil reset Accessibility app.orthant.orthant

  3. Make sure the copy of Orthant you want to grant is the one running. Quit any other.

  4. Reopen System Settings ▸ Privacy & Security ▸ Accessibility and enable Orthant.

The row shows a stale name or the wrong icon

Select the Orthant row in that pane and click − to remove it, then relaunch Orthant and grant it again. Turning the toggle off and on does not clear a stale row.

Every app’s toggle in that pane looks dimmed or wrongly off

The pane is showing a stale cache. Quit System Settings entirely and reopen it.

A shortcut does nothing

  • Another app may own the combination. Open Settings ▸ Shortcuts: a combination macOS itself has claimed is marked in the list rather than silently failing.
  • If every shortcut stopped working, quit and reopen Orthant, then check the Accessibility grant above.

An app ignores Orthant, or snaps to the wrong size

Some apps enforce their own minimum window size and will not go smaller; TextEdit is one. Orthant asks for the size you drew; the app is entitled to refuse it. A window that lands wider than the region you drew is usually this, not a placement bug.

Still stuck

Open an issue with your macOS version and what you saw.