When taking screenshots, macOS at some point followed iOS and introduced a “floating thumbnail,” which serves as a proxy of the screenshot you just took – you can drag it somewhere, open it to annotate, etc.

The thumbnail is a nice gesture. The problem is that I rarely do the things it enables, so the thumbnail is now an extra thing to deal with and dismiss. And you have to dismiss it, because inexplicably on macOS the floating thumbnail is diegetic, meaning it itself can be screenshotted. And this happens, routinely, if you do a few screenshots quickly in a row – the screenshotting tool literally ruining your screenshots. “You had one job,” &c.

(“Diegetic” is perhaps my favourite pretentious word. It generally stands for “in-universe.” If characters in a movie are listening to the song, that song is diegetic. If the song is just for the viewer as part of the soundtrack, that song is non-diegetic.)

You can turn off the thumbnail, but then outside of the sound – which is unreliable for other reasons – there is nothing else to tell you the screenshot was taken. And I think it’s good to have some sort of a confirmation, especially since the screenshot shortcuts are so harrowing.

Now, on Windows, when you press the equivalent (Windows key + PrtSc key), this happens:

I think this is better. It’s elegant, unmistakably recognizable as a screenshot, gone immediately, and a cute skeuomorphic nod towards old cameras.

One thing I really admired in earlier versions of Windows was the thing that was also its weak point: the keyboard orientation.

I miss the old tradition in Windows where many commands had underlined letters, and you could simply press Alt and that letter to jump to it:

If I remember correctly, eventually this got simplified so that the underlines were only there when you held Alt (although I bet there was an option to keep showing it all the time).

Opening Windows 11 today, it feels like the system got less elegant. I can still press Alt and stuff happens, but it doesn’t look nearly as good or tightly integrated, and the two alternate entry points (Alt and the keyboard shortcuts) become muddled:

In the meantime, on a Mac, in various places apps reinvent the wheel by their own thing.

I just saw this in Nova, the code editor, which is very thoughtful; those shortcuts only exist within this dialog (and one wonders if they couldn’t just be letters without modifiers)?

A little more old-fashioned from Photoshop, and the same question: could they just not be digits, without requiring ⌥?

Previously, I mentioned yet another idea from DevonThink.

I appreciate these gestures toward moving faster via a keyboard, but I wonder if we lost something that already used to work well in old Windows.