I think Mac OS has the most inaccessible hidden hotkey shortcuts out of every OS I've used. Even essential functions like showing hidden files in a directory is uniquely done through an hidden shortcut in Mac OS.
Perhaps, but the aforementioned screenshot shortcut I learned just like OP because I wanted to take a screenshot, and it's muscle memory for me as well. I even thought to myself before I clicked on the article "I'm pretty sure they are going to have CMD + Shift + 4 or CMD + Shift + 5 as the focal point of the article". I would call it "inaccessible" in terms of natural discovery, sure. But it is definitely not "inaccessible" in terms of ease of use and memory when you do know about it. I had to google "how to screenshot on mac" once in my life and I've used the keyboard shortcuts on a near daily basis for more than half a decade.
Some of them are obscure but there's a big list of them somewhere in System Preferences and you can change them. You can also change keyboard shortcuts in your programs too. Definitely something I miss from Mac OS X.
> essential functions like showing hidden files in a directory
How is that an essential function? My mom has never needed it in 20 years of using Macs. And when I want to know about hidden files, I pop open a terminal and ls -la.
As a lifetime Windows user who started using Macs for the day job about a decade ago, it was clear that Windows came from a keyboard-oriented background, and Macs come from a legacy of focusing on doing as much with a mouse as possible.
I have a lot of internal thoughts about why I like what I grew up with (particularly with respect to discoverable keyboard shortcuts), but it's just not worth the mental energy of exploring that with internet strangers. The bottom line for me is that a decade on, I still split it between a Macbook for work, Windows desktop for home/creative/gaming, and if I could reasonably work without MacOS I would, but I can't.
Just hours ago complained to a friend about how arcane some things in macOS are. Short of just pressing random key combinations, there is no way to discover that it's possible to paste/type a path into the standard file selection dialog.
(It's cmd-shift-g to get the text entry to appear, or simply forward slash to get it to appear with the slash already entered. Also, it says "Go to Folder", but if you direct it to a file, it will navigate to the folder the file is in and also select the file)
If all features had their menu or button visible, that would make the interface more complex.
Maybe they consider this as advanced features, that advanced users will find out anyway.
Seeing as you and I both know the shortcut, how is it inaccessible or hidden? Just because it’s not there cluttering up the visual interface doesn’t mean it’s hidden. For anyone who thinks they might want it, they can find it. For anyone else, they’ll never see it. Seems about right to me.
For showing hidden files and file extensions, there's a Terminal command you can run to permanently set it for every file. Of course, since it's only exposed through some command line utility, I forgot what it was and would have to search again.
Most of the time Mac shortcuts also come with a more discoverable approach. I’m not at my desktop atm, but isn’t there also the “grab” application for taking screenshots?
Man, you guys are changing my life. LOL. I knew about cmd-shift-4 (and the ctrl version), but I never knew about hitting spacebar to make it do a window.
Cmd + Shift + 5 will also give you access to some of options (as noted in the article)
Then let you adjust the selection area in relaxed way
I always make sure to enable "Remember Last Selection", which is great when you're taking repeated screenshots of the same area. Once you've created the selection area you'll get exact sizes every time.
Add in the control key in the shortcut above and the screenshot will go to the clipboard instead of a file. Useful for pasting a screenshot into something like Messages or Slack.
Also there's no need to hold down Option when clicking. You can however hit Esc to cancel the screenshot action.
after copying to clipboard, you can also paste it into an empty preview window by hitting ctrl-N (with preview in the foreground). you can paste additional clippings from the clipboard as impromptu layers that you can drag around on top of the first image.
in this way, folks (e.g., product managers) can quickly compose a mockup using components from a pre-existing UI without opening up photoshop/pixelmator/affinity.
After hitting space to go to select window mode, click select the window and its shadow, option click select the window without its shadow. Not sure why you say the option key is not needed.
I just figured out that these generate really nice transparent borders, which they use to add shadows. They look great when you put them in, e.g., Notion docs.
You know, I'm looking at all the tips and suggestions here, and my thoughts keep going back to SnagIt from TechSmith -- these problems seem to all just go away with SnagIt.
Sure, it's cross platform, but I don't care about that. It works better for me on macOS than the native facilities, and provides much better post-screenshot editing.
If I want to do video capture, the industry gold standard here is Camtasia, also from TechSmith.
I know the standard provided functionality, and I just don't want to be bothered.
Apparently it hides the shadows when you screenshot an individual window. Neat trick, although I think I'm going to apply the trick from the article, since I don't think I ever actually want the shadows.
Nice one. I found that it only takes a separate window on the mac screen, but when I want to do it on additional display, it does not allow me to select a window - it highlights all the screen as a window.
One for people like me who love to get the padding just right: Hold spacebar while dragging a screenshot area to reposition the upper-left corner of the drag area.
command-shift-4 allows you to drag-select a rectangle. While dragging you can hold down spacebar to switch to moving the selection instead of resizing it. neat feature!
I recommend against changing the format from png to jpg. The sample shows a picture of a dog, but most screenshots should be of applications (having a limited color palette) and must of the time the goal is readability (jpg compression drastically reduces text clarity relative to png)
If you need to reduce the size of a screenshot it's often better to keep it as a PNG and reduce the number of colors. 256 colors nearly always carries all the information needed without blurring the edges or the text. Often 128 or 64 is fine. Don't use dithering - it harms the compression ratio, so you may as well use a few more colors instead.
Often just applying lossless PNG optimisations using a tool like https://imageoptim.com/mac will sometimes save a large percentage, although it can take a minute or so for the tool to finish.
It can encode the difference to the previous pixel either up or above (or some combination). In purely horizontal or vertical gradients that's just as efficient as encoding constant color (and in fact, the Wikipedia page shows an example). For gradients in other directions, it depends on how homogeneous the slope is (because it will zip the diff to the previous pixel, i.e. the slope).
Also, I was surprised one common hack I used to see talked about a lot not dicussed given they delved into changes you can make on the CLI: you can change the default location (Eg to a "Screenshots" folder) instead of the default of cluttering the desktop
In terminal type "defaults write com.apple.screencapture location" where "location" is a path of your choosing.
(I'm fond of nesting a "screenshots" folder in the user directory pictures folder.)
There isn't that much practical reason to include the shadow though. In fact it tends to just make the important stuff smaller when sharing with someone because there's a bunch of border space surrounding the content, and whatever they're viewing in will show all of that unless they zoom in.
people love to talk about how many useful features MacOS has and how user-friendly it is but too many are buried behind a keyboard shortcut with no other way to access.
And no "read the manual" isn't it. From certain scale the manual should be out of the window and UI should accomodate for people to learn while using it.
I've been using computers too long to be able to "see" them through the eyes of a new user. But being user-friendly doesn't mean making every single feature user friendly or discoverable through visual manipulation. It means making the most common tasks user friendly and discoverable. The vast majority of users can be productive on macos without ever using a single keyboard shortcut.
I think macos does this better than pretty much any other desktop OS. Granted the bar isn't very high.
A great thing is that they’re very seldom not also in one of the app menus. Memorizing cmd + ? (Help menu search, sorta like Spotlight for the app and can find any standard menu items) is often a lot easier than remembering a bunch of other commands, and great for discovering them.
Another great thing is they’re generally quite consistent across apps, so memorizing one is usually applicable system wide. And another great thing is that if you don’t like the defaults (or have a menu item you wish had a shortcut in the first place), they’re almost always configurable.
It isn't hidden behind a keyboard shortcut. CMD+Shift+5 exposes the full screenshot UI, and under the clearly-named Options button is a menu that lets you pick the clipboard as the place to save.
Holding CTRL is just a... well... "shortcut" for that.
Then in Preview you can hit cmd-shift-a to annotate the image. When you're done, cmd-a to select all, then paste wherever applicable. Nothing saved to disk!
you can also flip these keyboard shortcuts around, which I did for the cmd-shift-4, as I almost always want it to the clipboard without persisting as a file
It's not a very ergonomic hotkey, though. I click the preview that appears in the bottom right to open, CMD-C to copy, and then click the trash icon to not save.
Another cool trick: Acorn image editor can take screenshots of the whole desktop environment (all windows, menus, etc) and put them in separate layers. You can then rearrange them as you wish.
That's a great idea. Capture the data first, then sort it out.
The new GNONE screenshot tool is similar because it capurures everything as soon as you hit Print Screen, but it still forces you to decide what to save immediately. It would be nice if has an option to save everything so you can pick out what you want in post.
I also want something like this for audio. Record every audio stream on my machine as different tracks. Then I can select which ones I want later.
Tip if you’re doing the ⌘⇧4+ space trick to capture a window: if you hold down command while selecting a window you can grab things like alerts that appear as part of the window.
Huge +1 to CleanShot (and PixelSnap). Definitely worth the money considering I use CleanShot daily. Quick annotations, simple video capture and re-encoding. The integration with PixelSnap is really nice as my screenshots have consistent padding. A small thing, but it takes me zero effort and is aesthetically pleasing.
Worth noting however that just switching to Preview and Cmd-N will open it up with your screen shot from the clipboard, and then cmd-shift-a gets you annotation tools. So this is a pretty streamlined workflow already.
I couldn't find anything on their website, my workflow, which I hate is:
Screenshot section to file, click on preview before it disappears, markup on iPad with Apple Pencil, copy to clipboard, paste to Docs/Slack/GitHub, delete file.
I really wish I could eliminate the temporary files in this process.
Do you happen to know if Cleanshot can do iPad annotation?
I wonder what the cost benefit on that little popup window for preview is after the screenshot. Too often I find myself being annoyed because it went away before I was able to click on it and as a result I just take another screenshot to get the window to pop up again. Way less often do I find myself annoyed because it stuck around too long.
I felt $29 was a bit much considering greenshot and other free things on windows that do similar ... but I use it hundreds of times some days and it's overall great.
Readit News
- First, type command + shift + 4 (the mouse pointer turns into crosshair).
- Then type the space bar (the crosshair turns into a camera icon).
- Hover the mouse pointer (a camera icon now), to highlight the chosen window.
- Finally, hold the option key and click.
This sounds like a lot of steps but it becomes muscle memory pretty quickly.
How is that an essential function? My mom has never needed it in 20 years of using Macs. And when I want to know about hidden files, I pop open a terminal and ls -la.
I have a lot of internal thoughts about why I like what I grew up with (particularly with respect to discoverable keyboard shortcuts), but it's just not worth the mental energy of exploring that with internet strangers. The bottom line for me is that a decade on, I still split it between a Macbook for work, Windows desktop for home/creative/gaming, and if I could reasonably work without MacOS I would, but I can't.
(It's cmd-shift-g to get the text entry to appear, or simply forward slash to get it to appear with the slash already entered. Also, it says "Go to Folder", but if you direct it to a file, it will navigate to the folder the file is in and also select the file)
For showing hidden files and file extensions, there's a Terminal command you can run to permanently set it for every file. Of course, since it's only exposed through some command line utility, I forgot what it was and would have to search again.
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So sad...
I'm fairly certain, it's in the menu bar too
Then let you adjust the selection area in relaxed way
I always make sure to enable "Remember Last Selection", which is great when you're taking repeated screenshots of the same area. Once you've created the selection area you'll get exact sizes every time.
Also there's no need to hold down Option when clicking. You can however hit Esc to cancel the screenshot action.
Holding option seems to remove the gradient shadow of the application window in the screenshot. Not needed, but it’s better in my opinion.
in this way, folks (e.g., product managers) can quickly compose a mockup using components from a pre-existing UI without opening up photoshop/pixelmator/affinity.
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Combination of CTRL+OPTION works too.
https://userbase.kde.org/images.userbase/4/4c/Spectacledefau...
The default kde screenshot app just has simple dropdown menus for all that. Is command+$, space, option+click really better than PrtScr, click?
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https://i.postimg.cc/zX5f4fqN/1.png
Makes it easier to find visually.
Edit: Of course I was 1 google search away from the answer: https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/change-icons-for-fi...
Sure, it's cross platform, but I don't care about that. It works better for me on macOS than the native facilities, and provides much better post-screenshot editing.
If I want to do video capture, the industry gold standard here is Camtasia, also from TechSmith.
I know the standard provided functionality, and I just don't want to be bothered.
bruh, what, god tier shortcut here
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Often just applying lossless PNG optimisations using a tool like https://imageoptim.com/mac will sometimes save a large percentage, although it can take a minute or so for the tool to finish.
With translucency and soft gradients everywhere I’m not sure how true that is anymore.
It can encode the difference to the previous pixel either up or above (or some combination). In purely horizontal or vertical gradients that's just as efficient as encoding constant color (and in fact, the Wikipedia page shows an example). For gradients in other directions, it depends on how homogeneous the slope is (because it will zip the diff to the previous pixel, i.e. the slope).
Also, I was surprised one common hack I used to see talked about a lot not dicussed given they delved into changes you can make on the CLI: you can change the default location (Eg to a "Screenshots" folder) instead of the default of cluttering the desktop
In terminal type "defaults write com.apple.screencapture location" where "location" is a path of your choosing.
(I'm fond of nesting a "screenshots" folder in the user directory pictures folder.)
And no "read the manual" isn't it. From certain scale the manual should be out of the window and UI should accomodate for people to learn while using it.
I think macos does this better than pretty much any other desktop OS. Granted the bar isn't very high.
Another great thing is they’re generally quite consistent across apps, so memorizing one is usually applicable system wide. And another great thing is that if you don’t like the defaults (or have a menu item you wish had a shortcut in the first place), they’re almost always configurable.
(the interface of which can also be reached via Cmd-Shift-5, allowing video recording and much more)
Holding CTRL is just a... well... "shortcut" for that.
The new GNONE screenshot tool is similar because it capurures everything as soon as you hit Print Screen, but it still forces you to decide what to save immediately. It would be nice if has an option to save everything so you can pick out what you want in post.
I also want something like this for audio. Record every audio stream on my machine as different tracks. Then I can select which ones I want later.
1) Monosnap (freemium) - https://monosnap.com
2) Cleanshot ($29) - https://cleanshot.com
Both tools also include large amount of extra functionality for taking screenshots and recordings.
It’s truly excellent and feels like a natural extension of the built-in functionality.
https://www.pixelmator.com/pro/
Screenshot section to file, click on preview before it disappears, markup on iPad with Apple Pencil, copy to clipboard, paste to Docs/Slack/GitHub, delete file.
I really wish I could eliminate the temporary files in this process.
Do you happen to know if Cleanshot can do iPad annotation?
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