macOS treats an ultrawide as a single display, so you get one menu bar, one full-screen app at a time, and a Space the width of a table. VirtualScreens divides the panel into separate displays that macOS itself believes in — each with its own menu bar, its own Spaces, and its own full screen. Halves, thirds, or a split of your own; set it per display and change it whenever.
They work together and switch on or off per display, from the menu bar or Settings.
Drag a window and drop it into a zone. Familiar if you have used FancyZones on Windows — the windows move, the display does not.
The panel is replaced by several displays macOS treats as real hardware. This is the part that gives you things Snap Zones cannot.
| Snap Zones | Virtual Screens | |
|---|---|---|
| Separate menu bars | No | Yes |
| Separate Spaces | No | Yes |
| Full screen inside a zone | No | Yes |
| Share one zone on a call | No | Yes |
| Refresh rate | Native | ~60 Hz |
| Permissions needed | Accessibility | Accessibility + Screen Recording |
The Dock fence and the mouse-wheel settings came from tools that were given away. Folding them into something paid would be taking back something already given, so they are not gated and will not be.
Checkout is not open yet. If you have tried it and want to pay now, email contact@thestouch.com and you will get a licence key back — the same key the store will issue. Nothing about the copy you already have needs reinstalling.
Drag it to Applications and open it. Updates arrive through Sparkle; if virtual screens are live when one installs, the cluster is taken down and your windows are carried back onto the panel before the app is replaced.
Homebrew submission pending. Until then, the disk image below.
macOS 14 Sonoma or later, on Apple silicon or Intel. Snap Zones needs Accessibility. Virtual Screens also needs Screen Recording, because each virtual screen is drawn from a capture of the panel. macOS requires a relaunch after granting Screen Recording — the app tells you when, and puts your windows back afterwards.
The whole app, not a reduced one, and no card and no account to start it. Two weeks because that is how long it takes to find out whether it genuinely suits you: whether the compositing is smooth enough for the way you work, whether your Mac drives the extra screens comfortably, whether you reach for it every day or forget it is there. Those are questions a feature list cannot answer and a refund request should not have to. Try it properly first, and only pay if it earns it.
Virtual Screens composites each screen from a live capture, and that runs at about 60 Hz regardless of what the panel can do. For writing, terminals, browsers and calls it is not noticeable. For gaming on a 144 Hz panel it is — leave Virtual Screens off for that display and use Snap Zones, which touches nothing and runs at native rate.
The virtual displays exist only while the process does, so they disappear with it and macOS puts the panel back by itself — measured, not assumed. There is also a ledger on disk recording where your monitor belongs, written the moment it moves, so the next launch can restore the arrangement even after a hard kill.
No. Licences are signed offline and checked against a key inside the app, so there is no licence server that can be unreachable, go down, or be switched off — someone on a plane with a licence they paid for keeps working. The only network request the app makes is the update check. Lost your key? Email contact@thestouch.com and it will be reissued.
Virtual Screens rests on a private CoreGraphics API that Apple could remove in any release. That is worth saying plainly rather than burying: it is the same foundation other virtual-display apps for the Mac are built on, it has been there for years, and it is still not a promise anyone can make on Apple's behalf. Snap Zones uses public APIs and is not exposed to this.
The App Store requires sandboxing, and creating a display cannot be done from inside the sandbox. That is also why it is signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple instead: your Mac still verifies it before it opens, without the network.