A nice detail in the Mac OS X screenshot tool

The screenshot tool in Mac OS X contains a nice detail: when you press Command+Shift+4 to select a region, the screen position of the cursor you’re shown before you click are replaced (when you click) by the dimensions of the rectangular region you’re selecting.

I’ve used that tool surely thousands of time, but only recently noticed it when I found myself wishing that it would show me the dimensions of the selection—and discovered that it did.

Sunday, March 1st, 2009, 9:08 pm    Both comments and pings are currently closed.

3 Responses to “A nice detail in the Mac OS X screenshot tool”

  1. Michael Long March 2nd, 2009 at 1:46 am

    Yeah, that’s one of the little features slipstreamed into Leopard. Comes in handy when doing web development and you simply want to determine the dimensions of an element.

  2. Paul Russo March 25th, 2009 at 9:23 am

    Something most people don’t know is that you can select an entire window for a screenshot by just clicking on it.

    > The screenshot tool in Mac OS X contains a nice detail: when
    > you press Command+Shift+4 to select a region

    … hit the space bar before selecting. The cursor turns into a camera. Click on a window.

    The entire window, and nothing else, is put into a screenshot.

  3. chris gray November 13th, 2009 at 8:03 am

    Unfortunately, one of the recent”fixes” seems to have the default size of the captured picture near-unreadable. I cannot find any way of setting that default back up to the same size as the original; it seems to thumbnail the result without making it larger when you click it.