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Comment by heavymark | Hacker News Reader

CMD+Shift+4 has always allowed you to take screenshots of any parts of your screen, (including your devtools), so curious why this is a feature in Chrome? Unless it's meant for Windows maybe where it's harder to take screenshots?

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It's nice to have a uniform way across all operating systems, but more important than that, being able to take screenshot of specific elements makes it much nicer than you having to crop the image manually or try to get the perfect snipped screenshot. I assume this also handles screenshots that are larger than your display, which would be very hard with OS screen grab for elements that can't fit in a single screen.

I imagine this will be useful for taking screenshots of arbitrary elements via the headless mode.

Anyway, why would it be harder to take screenshots in Windows? Have they restricted the Win32 API recently (I haven't kept tabs)?

I think he is referring to how on windows you can only screenshot the entire screen. Not sure if that has changed in recent years.

You can also screenshot the current window (Alt-PrtSc).

Since Vista, there is also snipping tool, which allows the same things as Mac screenshoting.

Win-Shift-S to select a rectangular area to capture

You can totally screenshot anything anyway you like on windows. The only difference is that windows has separate utility for this instead of a shortkey

this is the only thing preventing CasperJS / PhantomCSS from supporting Puppeteer, I think. will be cool to see this go in.

You can hit printscreen in windows to take screenshots (1 key instead of 3, even easier than mac).

I could imagine it would be useful in remote debugging sessions (such as when inspecting android webviews over USB).

Those are two totally different things. Windows take a screenshot of everything visible. Cmd+shift+4 on a Mac allows to select a region to save as a screenshot. Finally, if you are on Mac, this update provides node level acreenshot, allowing you to save an image of a HTML node with just one click, no need to drag the cursor. This is especially useful if the node takes more space than the viewport since before you had to stitch screenshots together.

> Windows take a screenshot of everything visible.

For the record, it's still not a region selector but there is also alt + printscreen to take only the visible windows.

There's also the built-in Snipping Tool, which allows you to take a screenshot of a selected region. I use it a lot at work.

Apparently, Windows 10 Creators Update comes with a shortcut to capture a region, Ctrl + Shift + S.

http://www.thewindowsclub.com/snipping-tool-capture-screensh...

Agreeing on 100% of that. Just wanted to point out taking screenshots in windows isn't "harder". (You can also alt-prtscr for just the active window, or use the snipping tool to screenshot a region).

Actually, the equivalent on Windows that was added on Windows 10 Creators update is winkey + shift + s.

Don't you still have to open Paint, press paste, hit save, and choose where to save the screenshot?

For the record, cmd+shift+3 takes a screenshot and immediately saves it to your desktop on macOS.

Yes, and Dropbox (& others might too) offers to listen to PrtScr and save in Dropbox/Screenshots as image automatically, without using paint or anything.

But dropbox doesn't save automatically when you use the snipping tool. Is there any way to make that happen?

https://github.com/ShareX/ShareX

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