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You are a few versions out of date here -- Mac screenshots now show a preview by default and clicking on the preview opens it for annotation. This is true as of 2018 (Mojave).

> Mac screenshots now show a preview by default

Ah, I have to select "preview". Thanks! That is nice to know.

Now, pardon me, as the highlight tool isn't working, everything is a rectangular selection no matter what I do.

Right click, "text and icons". Thank goodness for that[1], because apparently I have to first click what I thought was a stylized 'A' (or a wishbone), then a separate toolbar appears, that, ironically, doesn't have a way to highlight things. Go figure.

It does appear to be far more powerful than the snipping tool.

I'll still complain about the greyscale record button.

[1] With just icons I probably would have, quite literally, never clicked the markup button and just assumed the preview tool couldn't do any annotations. Holy cow that is a bad icon.

Edit: OIC, the markup button only does something when viewing PDFs, but the button pretends it does something (is clickable, changes state) when viewing image files. That is... distinctly not good UX.

> The Windows Snipping Tool (RIP) is IMHO the best paradigm for doing screenshots.

Obviously it's a little less popular than either the Windows or Mac versions, but I have to say that the KDE screenshot tool (Spectacle) is astonishingly good.

You can launch it (taking a full screen screenshot right away) with a single keypress, set your preferred capture modes (window capture, rectangle), set a delay, take a screenshot on-click, preview the image instantly in the Spectacle window, copy it to your clipboard, annotate the image inside Spectacle (like Snipping Tool), open the image in a different program, upload it to Imgur, send it to your phone, etc etc. All of these are no more than two clicks away in the program.

It's really just astonishingly good.

For what it's worth, the much maligned touch bar has good integration with the screenshot functionality, and you can adjust options through that interface while in "screenshot mode". Video recording is also easy there.

I'm also pretty sure recent versions of MacOS have annotation capabilities unless you directly copy to clipboard. Not sure though, don't have a mac anymore.

> The screenshot UI is frustrating, where to save to is under options, you cannot preview your screenshot, you cannot annotate the screenshot (something I do all the time on Windows), and having to choose between saving to file or clipboard is annoying.

I agree with all of this, but for what it's worth: Command-shift-{3,4,5} (and maybe others?) all bring up a rapid screenshot cursor. That action integrates with the little "smart" preview window that recent macOS releases have, so you can just click the little floating window that appears on the bottom right of your screen to see the capture you've just taken.

Command-shift-{3,4,5} (and maybe others?)

Command-Shift-6 takes a screenshot of your touchbar.

Surprisingly useful if you have your touchbar customized to output some kind of diagnostic data or other thing that you're monitoring.

And don’t forget ctrl-cmd-shift-3/4/5 to get it straight to your buffer

That's borderline gang sign.

> (Red circles mean record, grey circles don't have much meaning, but hey, need to keep that UI minimal, can't let usability or actual meaning get in the way!)

Each button in the screenshot toolbar shows a tooltip when you hover over — not even after a couple seconds, but immediately. The one you're talking about is labeled "Record Entire Screen."

> Each button in the screenshot toolbar shows a tooltip when you hover over — not even after a couple seconds, but immediately. The one you're talking about is labeled "Record Entire Screen."

You are right, that is how I figured it out.

By giving up on using visual queues, and hovering over each button individually to see if there were any surprises.

If the circle had literally just been red I would've guessed it immediately.

To be fair Apple's page for this does show the button with the circle over it, I somehow managed to miss the circle despite reading the page twice.

I do have a bias against icons in general, I prefer text labels on all my icons but apparently that is way too 90s. :/

(The dock is largely useless to me, I use Contexts to make MacOS usable, let's me switch apps by typing in the app's name, I have an equivalent program on Windows)