Is there a way to snip part of the screen with a hotkey?

As of Windows 10 Creators Update SHIFT + Windows Key ⊞ + S. Will open the snipping tool in rectangular select mode, the selected region will then copy to your clipboard.

10 wasted seconds a day now retrieved, thanks Microsoft.


If you don't want to run the snipping tool then there is a shortcut to take a shot of active window in Windows 8. Press the Alt+PrtSc, but it will copy the current windows screen shot to clipboard(it will not save it directly like Win+PrtSc) if you want to save it you need mspaint windows open and just paste it there and save it.

IIKC there is no built in way to capture a region with shortcut you have to use a third party tool like GreenShot which is freeware and has ability to capture the screen with keyboard shortcuts.

PrtSC will let you choose the region on desktop.

Ctrl+PrtSc will let you capture full window/screen.

Alt+PrtSc will let you capture focused window among many windows.

You can also set the image saving folder destination and output format of image in preferences.

For more about screenshot shortcuts see wikipedia


What you can do is just go to Snipping Tool properties and then provide the shrtcut to a Function key.Steps shown Below

  1. Find your Snipping Tool shortcut (what you use to start the Snipping Tool manually). If you can not find the shortcut, you can make a shortcut from SnippingTool.exe (in theSystem32 folder).
  2. Right-click the shortcut and select properties.
  3. Select the Shortcut tab.
  4. Click inside the Shortcut key box, then hit the hotkey(s) you want. Note that you can not type the key you want.

enter image description here

As per the previous post also Snipping Tool has 4 different types of Screenshots

1)Free-form Snip
2)rectangular Snip
3)Windows Snip
4)Full-screen Snip

The other way to find the Shortcut would be

Type Snipping Tool in Windows 8 Mainscreen. Just Right Click or Select it,and from the APPBAR you can go to the Open File Location and there you have the Snipping Tool. create your Shortcut.After that the Steps are the same...