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.

Os x screen capture keys