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macOS screenshot tricks to impress your co-workers

sal.dev

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Re: macOS screenshot tricks to impress your co-workers

#111
post #45

Here is a key sequence I use very often. It takes a screenshot of a chosen window without the window's shadow. - 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 becom…

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.

Re: macOS screenshot tricks to impress your co-workers

#113
post #56
post #45

Here is a key sequence I use very often. It takes a screenshot of a chosen window without the window's shadow. - 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 becom…

FYI, Cmd + Shift + 5 encapsulates all the various options into one UI.

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.

Re: macOS screenshot tricks to impress your co-workers

#114
post #99
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

are you not familiar with the concept of onboarding? Many websites and apps have this tour thing that highlight things that user haven't used, when appropriate.

The Mac does have onboarding, and it covers the basics. If it got into every single feature that someone calls "unintuitive," the onboarding would be 27 hours long

There's a continual onboarding process in iOS, the Tips app, which I think tries to tell you details when it sees you doing the basics of some feature.

Re: macOS screenshot tricks to impress your co-workers

#115

I usually use the screencapture command to take screenshots since it lets me specify an output file, e.g. screencapture -ow /tmp/myapplication.png

This is what Cmd + Shift + 3|4|5 is using under the hood. It's great to use for bash scripting if you need a precise type of screenshot

Re: macOS screenshot tricks to impress your co-workers

#116

This isn't totally screenshot related, but TextSniper is nice for quickly getting OCRed text from a selection on your screen, directly into your clipboard. https://textsniper.app/

There's a bunch of similar tools on Windows, usually for machine translating video games that haven't been localized.

eg https://github.com/Artikash/Textractor

Re: macOS screenshot tricks to impress your co-workers

#117
post #30

If you need to do any image manipulations/highlight on your screenshots, two of the best tools I found are: 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.

a FOSS alternative is https://flameshot.org/

Re: macOS screenshot tricks to impress your co-workers

#118
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't give any value judgement to it and I don't have any suggestions as I really haven't spent a lot of time on that problem space. If I become an OS developer I'll give that problem some thought. But the idea that Mac is somehow "intuitive" is laughable, IMO (I say that as someone who has used a wide variety of computer OSes since the 80s).

It's intuitive to do the basic stuff casual users need. If you want to go beyond that, you figure out how by doing some basic research. The OS isn't going to upload an entire reference manual into your brain as soon as you boot it for the first time.

And no one but you is claiming anything about manuals being beamed into brains. I disagree with the idea that MacOS is any more intuitive than any other modern OS (which is the claim that Apple and that I've heard others, make; I'm not saying you are making that claim necessarily). And to bring this back on point, to my very specific original comment, the poster I was responding too said this wasn't "hidden behind a keyboard shortcut" when it most definitely was. Not sure we need to delve into the nitty-gritty of how people learn OSes in this thread anymore than we have.

Re: macOS screenshot tricks to impress your co-workers

#119
post #26

This isn't totally screenshot related, but TextSniper is nice for quickly getting OCRed text from a selection on your screen, directly into your clipboard. https://textsniper.app/

I use macOCR[1] from the terminal for that. [1]: https://github.com/schappim/macOCR

You can also easily stitch something like that together yourself.

After `brew install pngpaste tesseract` (the latter is a dependency of the great OCRmyPDF tool btw), you can set `alias ocr="pngpaste - | tesseract -c debug_file=/dev/null stdin stdout | pbcopy; pbpaste"`.

I like having this alias better than macOCR because the workflow feels more ergonomic: You first cmd + shift + 4 to select text and then type `ocr` with the result being printed to stdout and being saved in your clipboard. With macOCR I have to go to the terminal first to initiate the process, then go back to what I want to screenshot etc.

Re: macOS screenshot tricks to impress your co-workers

#120
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI, Cmd + Shift + 5 encapsulates all the various options into one UI.

and adds screen recording functionality as a video

I used to use Kap for that to convert video to gif afterwards, but this just gives me one less app to use!

    brew uninstall kap
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