Run KillerShot. It opens the editor and puts its icon in the notification area. Press Print Screen anywhere in Windows, drag around what you want, and let go. The picture is on the clipboard, ready to paste.

KillerShot is a system tray app. Close the editor and it keeps running in the notification area, so Print Screen keeps working. Click the tray icon to capture again in the last mode (a region when the last mode was a window), or to stop a recording. Right-click it to capture in a specific mode, record, save or print the last capture, open the output folder, or exit.

Windows 11 can give Print Screen to Snipping Tool. When that setting is on, or another program already holds a shortcut, KillerShot cannot register it and says so in a notification.

Open Capture settings on the rail and choose Open the Windows Print Screen setting, turn off Use the Print screen key to open screen capture, then choose Try the shortcuts again from the tray menu. You can also give any action a different shortcut.

Turn on Start KillerShot when Windows starts in Capture settings. KillerShot then starts in the notification area without opening the editor, and Print Screen works from the moment you sign in.

The whole desktop is frozen the moment you press the key, and every monitor shows its own slice of that copy. Drag to select. A drag can cross monitors with different scaling, and the result is in screen pixels.

Hovering highlights the window under the pointer, and a single click without a drag takes that window. Escape or a right-click cancels with nothing copied and the last mode unchanged.

Takes the active window through Windows Graphics Capture, so a window that is partly covered still comes out whole. The rounded corners of Windows 11 windows are filled from the desktop behind them.

With The window shortcut lets me click the window to capture turned on, the shortcut shows the frozen desktop and you click the window you want. When nothing capturable is in front, such as the desktop or the taskbar, the monitor under the pointer is captured instead.

Ctrl + Print Screen captures the monitor under the pointer. Shift + Print Screen captures every monitor as one picture, laid out the way Windows arranges them.

The After capture section of Capture settings decides where a capture goes. Copy to the clipboard is on by default. Save to the output folder writes a file with no dialog, Windows' own Screenshots folder unless you choose another. You can also have KillerShot ask where to save each capture, open the editor after each one, and show a notification.

The Capture section adds a delay of up to 30 seconds, so you can open a menu before the desktop is frozen, and options to include the mouse pointer and play a camera sound.

Saved captures are named from a pattern. The default is KillerShot {yyyy}-{MM}-{dd} {HH}{mm}{ss}. The placeholders are {yyyy}, {MM}, {dd}, {HH}, {mm}, {ss}, {mode}, {width} and {height}. A name that is already taken gets (2), (3) and so on, so a capture never replaces an earlier one.

Choose PNG or JPEG. JPEG has a quality setting. PNG keeps every pixel exactly.

KillerShot keeps the last 20 captures in %LOCALAPPDATA%\KillerShot\Recent, so a capture you copied over on the clipboard can still be reopened. Open one from the Recent button in the editor. Older files are removed as new ones arrive.

The toolbar carries Select and move (V), Pen (P), Highlighter (H), Arrow (A), Rectangle (R), Ellipse (E), Text (T), Redact (X) and Crop (C), with a color and size for each mark. Single-letter keys stand down while you are typing.

Redact draws an opaque block. The saved file and the clipboard copy carry the flattened pixels, so the covered area cannot be recovered from them. Crop can be undone; the pixels outside a crop stay only in the undo history.

Select a mark to move it with the mouse or the arrow keys (Shift moves 10 pixels), or delete it with Delete. Undo and redo keep the last 50 steps.

Ctrl+O opens a PNG, JPEG, BMP, GIF or TIFF. Ctrl+S saves, Ctrl+Shift+S saves under a new name, Ctrl+C copies the finished picture and Ctrl+P prints it. A capture opened from Recent asks where to save instead of writing into the history folder.

Printing shrinks large pictures and rotates them to match the page by default. Enlarging small pictures is a separate option in Capture settings.

Ctrl+0 fits the picture to the window and Ctrl+1 shows it at 100%. Ctrl+plus and Ctrl+minus zoom in and out. Zoom only changes the view; the exported picture always has the capture's exact size.

Press Ctrl + Shift + Print Screen, click Record in the editor (Ctrl+R) or choose Record video from the tray. Pick a region, window or monitor on the frozen desktop, and recording starts after a three second countdown. Pressing the shortcut again during the countdown starts at once.

A frame marks the area and a bar offers Pause, Stop and Discard. Neither appears in the video. Press the shortcut again, click Stop, or click the tray icon to save.

MP4 records H.264 video at 15, 24, 30 or 60 frames per second, in Small file, Balanced or High quality. Sound can be off, the system sound, the microphone, or both, at 96 to 192 kbps.

The H.264 encoder in Windows takes video up to 4096 x 2304 pixels, with no side over 4096. A larger area, such as several monitors side by side, is scaled down to fit and keeps its shape. GIF keeps the full size.

Animated GIF records at 5 to 25 frames per second, at full, three-quarter or half size, with 32 to 256 colors, and loops forever unless you turn that off. GIFs have no sound.

Recordings save to Videos\Screen Recordings unless you choose another folder, with their own file name pattern. KillerShot can also copy the finished file to the clipboard and show a notification that opens its folder.

The same capture and recording code runs headless from Command Prompt, PowerShell, scripts and scheduled tasks. Each command runs in its own process, so it works whether or not KillerShot is already open in the tray, and it never touches the running copy's shortcuts.

Use KillerShot.exe --cli followed by a command. Results go to standard output, a one-line reason goes to standard error, and anything you leave out follows your KillerShot settings. KillerShot.Cli.exe takes the same commands without --cli and prints straight into a console.

Because KillerShot.exe is a Windows app, PowerShell and Command Prompt may return to the prompt before it finishes. Pipe the output, for example KillerShot.exe --cli capture --mode all | Out-String, or use KillerShot.Cli.exe when a script needs to wait.

Exit codes: 0 success, 1 the command failed, 2 the command line was not valid, 3 you cancelled the selector.

KillerMCP finds an installed KillerShot and offers its command line to AI agents as tools: list monitors and windows, take screenshots, record, list recent captures, open an image in the editor and read the settings. Agent captures leave the clipboard alone unless the agent asks. See the KillerMCP page.