You may want to do this when you’ve bought something online and want to keep a record of the purchase confirmation. Rather than save a link to a web page, you can save a picture of it, so you can see it exactly as it was at the time you shot it. Taking screenshots on your MacBook, iMac, iPhone, or iPad is a great way to save things. You can, of course, edit the workflow once you’ve installed it to change the keyword and the shortcut key to something else, should you want to.How To The Complete Guide to Taking Screenshots and Screen Recordings on Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch I’ve created Screenshot.alfredworkflow which does all this, so simply download it and install it into your Alfred and you’re good to go! This workflow includes the quickgrab binary, so you don’t need to get it separately. I also set up a hotkey for cmd+§ (finally a use for that § key!) which does the same thing. This then creates a PNG file with a name similar to Screenshot-20160724-1124429.png on my desktop.

To use, I ensure that I have the window I want to capture active and then activate Alfred, type screenshot and press return. $ sleep 2 quickgrab -file ~/Desktop/Screenshot-`date '+%Y%m%d-%H%M%S'`.pngĪlfred is little app that can run commands for you from a text window or via a hotkey, so this is what I use to trigger QuickGrab. When I investigated, I discovered that it’s because Chrome creates an invisible window at the top of its stack which needs to be ignored when looking for the active window.

A friend recently discovered that the current master version fails to take screenshots of Chrome if it’s the active window.

(The binary quickgrab is in the repo, so you don’t have to compile)Īs an aside, that link is to my fork which fixes Chrome. QuickGrabįortunately, there’s a little open source utility called QuickGrab which solves this. There’s a built-in command line utility called screencapture which requires you to know the Quartz window id of the window you want to capture, so it’s now a multi-step process to just take a screenshot of the currently active window. The built-in way to do this on a Mac is to use shift+cmd+4, then press space and then use your mouse to highlight the window and click.įor a good proportion of the time, I’m not using a mouse, so this doesn’t work great. I find myself needing to take screen captures of the currently active window in OS X reasonably frequently.

How to take a screenshot on mac book