Hacker News Reader

Comment by rikkus | Hacker News Reader

I can never remember if it's 3 or 4, and Alt, or Command, or Ctrl, or Shift, or a combination of, or...

Unfortunately it's a bit of all of them. There are multiple ways to take screenshots on a mac depending on what you're after:

Cmd-Shift-3: takes a full screen shot.

Cmd-Shift-4: gives you a crosshair to select a portion of the screen.

Cmd-Shift-4 + Space: gives you the crosshair, and pressing space allows you to select individual windows to screenshot.

All of the commands above will save the resulting screen shot to the desktop. If you add Alt to any of the commands, it instead saves the shot to the clipboard. (So the OSX equivalent to the "Print Screen" button in Windows is Cmd-Alt-Shift-3)

Then I recommend to use Preview.app's File->Take Screen Shot. Not as quick, but easy to remember.

That's handy yet completely random. Would be nice if it was under the Apple menu.

Cool, didn't know about that. That's better than using Grab.app, which has the same functionality and also comes with Macs by default. In Preview, you can immediately manipulate the image or save in more exotic formats than TIFF (the only format allowed in Grab).

It suffers greatly from the OS X modifier key disease. And there's what...like 4 different kinds of screenshots?

edit apparently there are 7 from reading the comments below.

Same here. I just mash various combos of shift, command, control, option, and 3 until it works.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com