How to Take Screenshots and Record Your Screen in macOS Mojave

Gone are the days of using third-party screenshot tools and recording your screen in Quicktime. Apple includes built-in tools for taking screenshots and recording videos in macOS Mojave, and they’re pretty good.

The Hotkeys to Know

While you can technically launch the screenshot tool from the “Other” folder in Launchpad, it’s best to learn the hotkeys. You can change all of these combos through the Shortcuts pane in the keyboard preferences, but these are the defaults:

Command+Shift+3: Saves the whole screen to a file on your desktop (and will also show in the bottom right corner, to drag into different apps. You can hold Control while doing this to save it only to the clipboard, to keep your desktop clear.
Command+Shift+4: Opens up a selection menu where you can draw a box around what you want to select. It’ll also save to the desktop, and you can also hold Control to copy only to the clipboard.
Command+Shift+5: This combo is a special case. It opens up the main screenshot options bar where you can access all the settings and different tools:

From left to right, the tools on this bar:

Capture the entire screen.
Capture a specific window, and automatically crops the image.
Capture a selected portion, and is the default option.
Start a recording of the whole screen.
Start a recording of the selected portion of the screen.

The options menu also includes some additional settings that let you choose things like where the screenshot is saved and whether a timer is used.

After you’re done, you can hit “Capture” or “Record,” or just press Return. Keep in mind that if you’re recording a video, you’ll have to open it up again to stop the recording, or press the stop button in the menubar.