Everybody who routinely takes screenshots on a Mac knows very well the motor memory heaven and hell that are the screenshotting shortcuts: ⌘⇧3 to grab the whole screen, ⌘⇧4 to grab part of it, hold ⌃ ahead of time to put the result in the clipboard, press space at the right moment to select a window, hold ⌥ at a different time to remove a shadow, and so on. (Yes, there’s more.)

It’s strange to talk about those shortcuts, because the world is divided into two groups: people who have never used any of these because they are the scariest shortcuts that induce RSI if you just think about them, and people who have used them for so long that their fingers do all the work. Either group would struggle with writing the above paragraph – as did I, needing to watch my hands first, and then take notes.

But: why do the shortcuts start with 3? After all, ⌘⇧1 and ⌘⇧2 don’t seem to do anything.

That wasn’t always the case. Turns out that once upon a time Apple was trying to create a larger universe of nerdy shortcuts for your Mac. The effort is so old – they were introduced in 1986 – that ⌘⇧1 was added as a quick shortcut to… eject the floppy disk. And, since you could also have an external floppy drive, ⌘⇧2 was assigned to eject that, and the shortcuts for screenshots followed in sequence: ⌘⇧3 to save the screen, and ⌘⇧4 to send it straight to your printer. (Even then, there was already Caps Lock thrown into the mix, too, switching between the entire screen and the current window.)

Early BASIC programmers knew to separate their line numbers by 10 because there will always be a line you want to insert in between, but keyboard shortcut designers do not have that luxury.

And so the nice system backfired immediately. Some Macs started coming with two built-in floppy drives, but still allowed you to plug in an external one. What would you press to eject that?

Well, of course it had to be ⌘⇧0, since ⌘⇧3 was already taken.

(In an absolutely delicious bit of rhyming, the 0 key itself is on the “wrong” side of most keyboards – except Hungarian – because it was added to keyboards before the 1 key was! It felt more natural to put it after 9 than right before 2.)

Things were quiet for a while. Floppies disappeared over time. Only in 2018, Apple evolved the old Grab app that it inherited from NeXT into a Screenshot app, and assigned it a new shortcut, ⌘⇧5. That was a nice improvement – video recording, a very helpful timer, a few smaller options, and a bit of a GUI thrown atop for convenience.

There are a bunch of system and change management lessons in here, but I want to talk about something else I just learned about.

Acorn 8, a graphic app, has a delightful screenshotting feature parked under ⌘⇧7 that does something incredible: it takes a screenshot, but does so in a way where windows are separate layers, grouped by app. It’s amazing; you can re-compose stuff afterwards, reveal covered stuff, remove windows, even change the wallpaper. A mouse cursor arrives too in its own tiny layer, like a cherry on top.

I’m sharing this both because I gather people who read this blog take a lot of screenshots – but also because this is software craft. I know “delightful” is (mis—? ab—?)used to refer to beautiful but slow transitions, and cute but distracting UI copy, but this is the stuff of true delight: using newly abundant technology to actually do something useful, and rewrite the rules of something that hasn’t been touched for ages, in a way that feels magical. There is still room for improvement – notably, you cannot just fire and forget a screenshot straight into your filesystem – but I find this kind of stuff inspiring.

I also know what you’re thinking: hey, what happened to ⌘⇧6? I’m not going to tell you. It’s probably not that hard to google it, but maybe you’ll enjoy trying to guess like I did. What was a feature of Macs that arrived after 2018 that Apple would want you to forget about even more so than the floppy disks?