28 September 2026 · 5 minute read
Snipping Tool on a Mac
There is no app called Snipping Tool on a Mac, and no Print Screen key on the keyboard. Both jobs are done by shortcuts instead, and once you know the three of them you will probably find the Mac version quicker than the one you left behind.
The short answer. ⇧+⌘+4 is Win+Shift+S. ⇧+⌘+3 is Print Screen. Add Control to either one to copy to the clipboard instead of saving a file.
Snip an area — Shift+Command+4
Press ⇧+⌘+4. The pointer turns into a crosshair with the pixel coordinates beside it. Drag a rectangle and let go.
Three things worth knowing while the crosshair is up, because none of them are discoverable:
- Hold Space mid-drag to move the whole selection without resizing it.
- Hold ⇧ mid-drag to lock one edge and adjust only the other.
- Press Esc to cancel without taking anything.
Tap Space before dragging and the crosshair becomes a camera: click any window to capture it cleanly, with its shadow and nothing behind it. That is the one most people never find, and it is the best-looking screenshot macOS produces.
The whole screen — Shift+Command+3
This is Print Screen. Everything on every display, saved immediately. If you have two monitors you get two files.
The full toolbar — Shift+Command+5
Press ⇧+⌘+5 and a control bar appears along the bottom of the screen. This is the closest thing to the Snipping Tool window: capture the whole screen, a chosen window or a selection, plus record the screen or a portion of it as video.
Its Options menu is where the useful settings live — where screenshots save, a five or ten second timer, whether to show the pointer, and whether to keep showing the thumbnail that floats in the corner afterwards. If that thumbnail annoys you, turning off Show Floating Thumbnail here makes screenshots save instantly and silently.
Copying instead of saving
On Windows, Win+Shift+S puts the snip on the clipboard and saves nothing. On a Mac the default is the opposite: it writes a PNG to your Desktop.
To get the Windows behaviour, add Control:
- ⌃+⇧+⌘+4 — snip an area to the clipboard
- ⌃+⇧+⌘+3 — whole screen to the clipboard
Then paste with ⌘+V wherever you need it.
Where the files go, and how to change it
By default the Desktop, named Screenshot 2026-09-28 at 10.14.22 am.png. A Desktop full of these is the most common complaint from switchers.
Change it in ⇧+⌘+5 ▸ Options ▸ Save to, which offers Documents, Clipboard, Mail, Messages, Preview or any folder you choose. Setting it to a dedicated Screenshots folder takes ten seconds and solves the problem permanently.
Annotating what you captured
Click the floating thumbnail before it disappears and Markup opens: arrows, boxes, text, highlighter, crop and a signature tool. It covers what Snip & Sketch does on Windows.
If the thumbnail has already gone, open the file and press Space in Finder for Quick Look, then click the pen icon — same tools, no extra app.
A dedicated snipping app, if that is all you want
Switchover Snip does this one job properly. Press its shortcut and you get the Windows behaviour: drag a region, pick a window, or take the whole screen. Where macOS drops a file on your Desktop and shows a thumbnail for a few seconds, Snip opens the capture straight into a small editor — arrows, boxes, pen, highlighter and text — so you can mark it up and copy it without the round trip through Finder.
Two things it adds that macOS does not: you can pin a capture on top of everything else, which is genuinely useful when you are copying numbers from one window into another, and it can pull the text out of a capture so you can paste it as words rather than a picture.
It needs the Screen & System Audio Recording permission, for the obvious reason that it captures the screen — macOS gates every screenshot tool behind it, including Apple's own. It has no network access and collects nothing.
Switchover Snip on the Mac App Store · what it does in full
If you would rather keep the Windows keys
All of the above is built into macOS and free. The only thing it cannot do is answer to the keys your fingers already know, and for many switchers that is the whole problem — you press Win+⇧+S, nothing happens, and you have to stop and remember.
Switchover is a free menu bar app that maps the Windows keys onto the Mac ones, so Win+⇧+S snips a region and Print Screen captures the whole screen. It does the same for Ctrl+X to move files in Finder, Win+V for clipboard history and Ctrl+Alt+Delete. Every mapping has its own switch, so you can take the two you want and leave the rest.
Free on the Mac App Store. No account, no network access, nothing collected.
Download free on the Mac App Store