Reference
Snippy Snip's shortcuts work from anywhere — you don't need the app in front of you. They all use Control, not Command, which is the one thing worth committing to memory.
| ⌃⇧4 | Capture a region. Drag to snip. It's on your clipboard before you let go. |
| Space | Switch capture mode mid-capture. After ⌃⇧4, tap Space to toggle between region and window capture — no need to start over. |
| ⌃⇧5 | Start / stop recording. Press once to begin, again to finish. Pro |
| ⌃⇧6 | Grab text (OCR). Drag over any text on screen and it lands on your clipboard. Pro |
Window and full-screen capture live in the menu bar icon, along with everything else.
This trips up almost everyone at least once, because ⇧⌘4 is twenty years of Mac muscle memory. That one is macOS's own screenshot tool, and it has nothing to do with Snippy Snip.
Snippy Snip is ⌃⇧4 — Control, Shift, 4. No Command key.
Quick tell: if a screenshot file appears on your Desktop, you pressed macOS's shortcut. Snippy Snip never writes to your Desktop — it opens the editor and puts the image on your clipboard.
If ⌃⇧4 does nothing — no crosshair, no editor — another app has almost certainly claimed the same combination. macOS gives the keystroke to one app, and it may not be ours.
The usual suspects are the launchers and window managers people already run: Raycast, Alfred, Rectangle, CleanShot X, and Logitech or Razer driver software. Open the one you use, find its shortcut settings, and search for Control‑Shift‑4. Changing it there frees the combination for Snippy Snip.
Snippy Snip's own shortcuts are fixed for now — the fix is to change the other app's binding. Custom shortcuts inside Snippy Snip are on the list.
Snippy Snip records whether a shortcut actually arrived, which separates something else ate the keystroke from the capture itself failed. In the menu bar icon (or the Snippy Snip menu), choose Reveal Diagnostics Log… and look for lines reading global hotkey delivered.
If you press ⌃⇧4 and no such line appears, the keystroke never got to us — go back to step 1. If it does appear and nothing visible happened, send us the log with the Send Feedback button and we'll dig in.
You can switch macOS's screenshot shortcuts off so the old habit stops cluttering your Desktop: System Settings › Keyboard › Keyboard Shortcuts… › Screenshots, then untick the ones you don't want.
Worth being clear: turning off ⇧⌘4 doesn't hand it to Snippy Snip — it just makes that combination do nothing, which is what makes the new habit stick. Snippy Snip stays on ⌃⇧4. You can undo it in the same place at any time.
If reaching for three keys is the part you don't like, bind ⌃⇧4 to a button on your mouse and capture becomes a single click.