Episode: 3976
Title: HPR3976: The Evolution of Windows' Snipping Tool
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3976/hpr3976.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 18:11:14

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3976 from Monday the 30th of October 2023.
Today's show is entitled, The Evolution of Windows Snipping Tool.
It is hosted by Keith Murray and is about six minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, KD gives some history of the evolution of screenshot capabilities on Windows.
In an ever-evolving technology landscape, something that has remained a need for many people,
regardless of platform, is a reliable screenshot tool.
My primary computing environment has been and still is Microsoft Windows.
For a long time, the screenshot story on Windows was pretty poor.
When I first dove into Mac OS back in the early 2000s, I was pleasantly surprised that
my MacBook did a much better job of capturing screens than my old XP machine had done.
I'm not super familiar with how this was done back on Linux distros back at that time,
but I would imagine the capabilities were similar, even though it was almost 20 years ago.
Thankfully, things were about to improve in the Windows ecosystem too, and the story
has a bit of an unlikely hero.
The much-maligned Windows Vista would provide a great new feature for Windows users.
The Snipping Tool.
So let's cast our minds back to the old days of Windows XP in the earlier 16-bit versions
of Windows.
This is the era where the tools were so bad, they live on as a disturbing sense memory
in the minds of many to this day.
The old screenshot method was a blunt hammer, lacking any nuance and offering virtually
no real options for image manipulation.
It was simple to use by pressing the otherwise useless print screen key that existed on most
PC keyboards, but that would cause a bitmap image of the current screen to be placed on the
Windows clipboard where it could then be pasted into something like Microsoft Paint if you
wanted to save the image or something like Microsoft Word to be cropped into a document.
But since most applications couldn't accept the image data directly for most people, those
were really your only two options.
With the launch of Windows Vista in 2007, Microsoft decided it was time to fix this long-standing
deficiency in Windows tooling and bring this essential feature into the 21st century,
and thus the Snipping Tool was born.
Side note, yes, the Snipping Tool was actually previously available as a power toy in Windows
XP and Windows tablet edition a few years before, but Vista was the first mainstream release
and where most people finally got their hands on it.
The Snipping Tool was designed to replace the old print screen command, which often required
users to fumble with Microsoft Paint or other applications to deal with the massive bitmap
files.
The two main features of the Snipping Tool hadn't been previously available on Windows.
The first was that screenshots were saved to disk as an image file automatically.
It also defaulted to PNG files rather than the bulkier and far less useful bitmap.
If you don't need the files clogging up your disk, you can set them to go only to the
clipboard and just save them from the Snipping Tool UI as needed.
But arguably, the more critical and useful feature was that you could now freeze the screen
and draw a box of any arbitrary size around whatever portion of the screen you wish to capture,
be it a window, a line of text, an entire screen, or even spanning across multiple displays.
This new fan flexibility made capturing and sharing screen content infinitely easier.
Another valuable addition in later versions of Windows was the Snip and Sketch tool.
A small desktop image manipulation program that enables users to make quick and easy modifications
to captured images.
With a small pop-up in the corner of your screen, you could access the tool and enhance
the screenshots before sharing them.
The captured content is readily available in the clipboard, making it easy to paste into
various applications from messaging tools like Discord and Slack to email programs to
document editors.
This was originally designed to be part of the Windows 10 ink workspace, but is useful
in other scenarios too.
Snipping Sketch was to a supersede at the Snipping Tool, but Microsoft left both in place,
keeping the older tool as a non-default option in Windows 10.
For me, this is just a built-in part of my workflow.
The new keyboard shortcut, Windows key plus shift plus S, will trigger the crosshairs
and allow me to select any part of the screen that I need to capture.
I can paste that capture into pretty much any application I want.
Very rarely, I'll use the Snipping Tool UI to mark up the image with some arrows or something,
but for the most part, I just use them as is for documentation and chat conversations,
or as a reference image in an email to demonstrate something to a calling on Slack.
For the most part, it's completely seamless.
Finally, while not really a screenshot capability, the tool also allows for the capture of video
in any arbitrary portion of the screen.
I've most often used this when showing people how to perform a particular task, where
some menu option might get buried on a website.
Recently, Windows 11 has renamed Snipping Sketch to the Snipping Tool, completing the circle
and sealing the fate of the original Vista era screenshot application.
The current version shares most of its features with the earlier versions, mostly having been
updated for the more modern cross-platform Windows UI frameworks.
It's nice to see something actually getting retired and shut down once the new tool arrives,
not leaving the legacy version to languished well past its useful lifetime.
The Snipping Tool has come a long way in its journey to become an essential part of
the Windows ecosystem.
It's made capturing and sharing screenshots easier, more efficient, and kept the Windows
experience consistent with the majority of the other operating systems that already
have good screen capture capabilities.
I've included links for a number of the things that I've mentioned today in the show notes
over at HackerPublicRadio.org.
If you're curious to deep dive any parts of the journey that I've talked about today,
head on over to the website and check it out.
While you're there, if you have any history or knowledge about possibly little known features
of your favorite software or operating system, record us a show for Hacker Public Radio and
tell us all about it.
Until next time, this is Katie Murray for Hacker Public Radio.
Thanks for listening.
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