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.
Or keep the other app as it is and give Snippy Snip a different combination — see use your own keys below.
Since build 37, all three shortcuts are yours to change: open Settings from the menu bar icon (or press ⌘, in the editor), click a field under Shortcuts, and press the combination you want.
Then the app asks you to press it once more. That press is the proof: macOS never tells an app whether a shortcut is really its own, so Snippy Snip waits until your combination actually reaches it before letting go of the old one. If nothing arrives within twelve seconds, another app or macOS owns that combination, the old shortcut stays, and the app says so — nobody is left with a shortcut that silently does nothing.
Want ⇧⌘4 itself? Turn macOS's own off first — while it's on, macOS takes the press before any app can even see it, and the field tells you so with a button straight to System Settings › Keyboard › Shortcuts › Screenshots. Switch it off there, press it in the field again, and it's yours.
Reset next to any field puts the default back. A combination has to include Control, Option or Command — a bare key would fire while you type.
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.