How can I take a screenshot while holding down the control key?

Solution 1:

Open Terminal and type the command below. From there you have 10 seconds before the screenshot is taken (you can do whatever you want or hold any keys you want in that time).

Afterwards, you can find the screenshot in the directory you executed the command.

screencapture -T 10 screenshot.jpg

Solution 2:

Can you give more context of how you want to use it? I was able to get a screen grab of a pop-up menu by control-clicking, then doing (Command ⌘+Control+Shift ⇧+3 (instead of releasing the mouse and dragging the selection). This saved a full screen capture to the clipboard, which I could then crop, etc.

You could redefine the keyboard shortcuts so that adding Control to the normal shortcut saves to a file, rather than making it save to the clipboard.

There is also the Grab program in Utilities, which lets you do timed screenshots, etc, and third party programs which offer even more options.

Solution 3:

Pretty simple.

Go to System Preferences, Keyboard, Keyboard Shortcuts, Screen Shots.

From there you can double click the shortcut and change it to any shortcut with "ctrl" included.

Voilá.

Hope it works for you.