Useful Snip and Sketch Shortcuts in Windows 11 (& Windows 10)

The built-in Snip and Sketch is a handy tool on the Windows operating systems to manage the daily screen capturing tasks. It has enough capturing types, basic editing and annotations options. In this article, we will show you some useful Snip and Sketch shortcuts with our favourite features in one place.

It is a pre-installed app in Windows 11 and Windows 10. Microsoft has been constantly improving and changing the features of this tool with every major update.

This tool easily captures the screen, so you don’t need any other paid software to take perfect screenshots on your laptop or desktop computers.

Snip and Sketch/Snipping Tool Naming Confusion:

The ‘Snipping Tool’ is the old tool that came with the older version of Windows 10. From October 2018 Windows 10 update, Microsoft added the new capturing tool called ‘Snip & Sketch.’ So, in this case, a Windows 10 (with or later October 2018 update) will have both programs. The idea was to replace the ‘Snipping Tool’ with the ‘Snip and Sketch’ in the new Windows 11.

When the Windows 11 evaluation version got released, it had both screen capturing applications as Windows 10, but Microsoft was suggesting the snipping tool users to use ‘Snip & Sketch.’

With the latest and final version of Windows 11, you will get the single tool only. Even though the product is identical to ‘Snip & Sketch’ of Windows 10, the same program is now called ‘Snipping Tool’ in Windows 11. So, bascially we are using the same Snip & Sketch as Snipping Tool in Windows 11.

The below keyboard shortcuts on Snip & Sketch (Windows 10) are suitable for Snipping Tool in Windows 11 too.

How to Launch Snip & Sketch?

1) The quick way is to search for snip and open the tool.

2) Use the keyboard shortcut to open the capture.

This is the default keyboard shortcut combination to open Snip & Sketch in Windows 10 or the Snipping tool in Windows 11.

Press Windows logo + Shift +S together to get the capturing tool.

3) We can use the action center in Windows 10.

Click on the action center in the task bar, then select ‘Screen snip’ as shown below.

4) Configure the keyboard print screen (PrtScn) key to open the Snipping Tool.

Search for ‘Accessibility’ in Windows 11 settings app, then select the keyboard.

Here enable the “Use the Print screen button to open screen snipping’ option.

Once this is enabled, pressing the Prtscn key on the keyboard will open the screen capture tool.

It has multiple screen capture types; hovering the mouse above each will indicate the type.

After capturing a screen, you can use the below keyboard shortcuts in Snip and Sketch

15+ Useful Snip and Sketch Shortcuts (Snipping Tool in Windows 11)

Basically, after opening the tool, if you press the Alt key, it will show the following key you need to press to get different options.

1. Alt + N – Open a new Snip & Sketch snip
2. Alt + T – Select touch writing (It is helpful if you have a pen or touch screen laptop)
3. Alt + B – Select ballpoint pen
4. Alt + I – Enable the Pencil tool
5. Alt + H – Select highlighter
6. Alt + E – Activate eraser
7. Alt + R – Crop the snip
8. Alt+Z – Zoom control. Once you press this key, you can use the right arrow key to zoom in and the left arrow key to Zoom out.
9. Alt + S (Ctrl + S) – Save the Snip
10. Alt + C (Ctrl + C ) – Copy the snip to the clipboard so that you can paste it into Word or Outlook.
11. Alt + A – Share
12. Alt + M – See more tools
13. Alt + U (Ctrl + Z) – Undo
14. Alt + D (Ctrl + Y) – Redo
15. Ctrl + P – Print
16. Ctrl + O – Open an existing image file to edit
17.  Alt+ F4 – Close

These are the most helpful keyboard shortcuts. As you noticed, a few of the same tasks can be done by pressing the Alt or Ctrl key. We don’t want to mention them as another new shortcut.

If you prefer to use the keyboard than the mouse for quicker actions, I’m sure the above Snip and Sketch shortcuts will be helpful for you. Feel free to let us know which one is new and handy for you. Also, if you find any more tricky shortcuts in the Snipping tool in Windows 11, let us know to update this list.