Windows 11 beta changes what the Print Screen button does after 33 years
Enlarge / The Print Screen key on a recent Dell laptop keyboard. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)
Windows 11 has modernized many Windows features that haven't been updated in a long time, including venerable apps like Notepad and Sound Recorder. But in a beta build released earlier this month, the company changed something even older: Pressing the Print Screen button on your keyboard will open the Snipping Tool rather than copying the contents of your screen to the clipboard to be pasted into an image-editing app.
In the current non-beta version of Windows 11, this Print Screen behavior is an off-by-default toggle in the keyboard accessibility settings. The change will make the setting on-by-default instead.
In the old MS-DOS days before graphical user interfaces became the norm, the function of the Print Screen button was quite literal-take whatever text was on-screen and print it with an actual physical printer. (Old keyboards also had room to write "print screen" on a keycap, whereas most modern keyboards shorten it to "prt sc" or something similarly inscrutable to people who don't already know what the key does.) The more abstract copy-to-clipboard behavior dates at least as far back as Windows 3.0, which was originally released in 1990. Windows' built-in screenshot tools have changed, from the Snipping Tool to Windows 10's Snip & Sketch back to Windows 11's Snipping tool, but the Print Screen key kept on doing the same thing.