There's a few things I do when I first set up a new Mac, but one of the first and maybe my favourite, is a little trick for making screenshots live on your clipboard by default, and it's something I've never seen anyone write about so I thought I would share in case it improves anyone else's life like it has mine.
If you didn't know, macOS has a couple of really useful default keyboard shortcuts for taking screenshots: ⌘⇧3 will capture the whole screen and save it as a file on your desktop, while ⌘⇧4 will let you capture a custom area of the screen and also creates a file.
As a bonus tip, pressing space while in the mode for capturing a custom area lets you capture a really clean screenshot of just a single window, complete with drop shadow:
But 99% of the time I'm not really interested in keeping that image file around, I'm usually taking a screenshot for a single purpose: to send to someone via slack or email, to embed in a pull request or Jira ticket, etc.
So really I just want most of these images once, and for them to basically delete themselves, and luckily, that's more or less possible, as macOS has another, more obscure set of keyboard shortcuts, which will capture screenshots directly to your clipboard, so you can just paste it where it needs to go and forget about it, not only is it way quicker to send an image like this, but also it doesn't leave dozens of screenshot files hanging around on your desktop to delete later.
The built in keyboard shortcuts for this however are a bit cumbersome, they are ⌘⇧⌃3 and ⌘⇧⌃4. Go ahead and try those—pain in the ass. So the first thing I do on a new Mac is swap them over:
If I ever need the original behaviour, I can still do the awkward long keyboard shortcut, but I essentially never do. Plus, if after you screenshot to your clipboard you realise you want that image as a file, all you have to do is open preview and hit ⌘N with an image on your clipboard and it will create a file for you to save immediately.
The settings for these shortcuts are a little buried, and updating them is a bit tedious, so while writing this post I thought I'd take the opportunity to create a little applet that swapped these shortcuts with one click, and it works both ways around, so if you try it and hate it, just launch the app and swap them back. It looks like this:
And you can download it here: