Self Service

Computer journalists make screenshots all the time, but it’s easy to forget they can be useful for everyone else too. Here are our tips for super screenshots…

To take a basic screenshot of the whole screen, hit ß+ç+3. The files are saved to your desktop by default.

If you use ß+ç+4, you can drag a rectangular area, or hit space to highlight a single window. Click to save a screenshot of just this highlighted area.

Sometimes you might want a screenshot of something that prevents you from using the hot keys. (Perhaps the application behaves differently when ≈ is pressed, or you want to make a screenshot while dragging.) Open Terminal and type screencapture -T 10 screenshot.jpg. This waits ten seconds and then captures the entire screen.

By default, windows are captured with a drop shadow around them. This can be tricky to neatly remove afterwards, so if you don’t want it, it’s better to disable shadows entirely. In Terminal: defaults write com.apple. screencapture disable-shadow -bool TRUE Restart the UI server daemon for the changes to take effect with this command: killall SystemUIServer

If you have multiple monitors, you can capture from all of them at once by simply specifying more than one file name, like this: screencapture myfirstscreen.jpg mysecondscreen. jpg and so on.