How to [screen record] on a Mac

macOS records its own screen without a single download. Press ⇧⌘5, choose whether to capture the whole display or just a portion, and click Record. That covers most needs. But the built-in recorder has real limits, and if you make demos, tutorials, or bug reports often, a native app that follows your cursor and cleans the clip up for you saves a lot of editing.

Here is the fast version. The ⇧⌘5 toolbar is the quickest built-in route: it lives one shortcut away and starts recording in two clicks. QuickTime Player does the same job with a File menu you may already know, and it can trim the result. Both save a .mov file to your Desktop and both record your microphone only, never the sound coming out of your Mac. The third method, Kapshot, records system audio and mic together, zooms to follow your pointer automatically, and exports a polished clip with no watermark. All three are below.

This is the built-in recorder most people never notice. The same ⇧⌘5 toolbar that takes screenshots also holds the screen recording controls, so there is nothing to install and nothing to open first.

1
Press ⇧⌘5
Hold Shift and Command, then tap 5. A floating toolbar appears along the bottom of the screen with capture buttons on the left and two recording buttons on the right.
2
Pick Record Entire Screen or Record Selected Portion
The two rightmost buttons are the recording modes. Choose Record Entire Screen to capture the whole display, or Record Selected Portion to drag a box around just the area you want. You can resize that box before you start.
3
Set your microphone under Options
Click Options in the toolbar. Under Microphone, pick your built-in mic or a headset to narrate. This menu is also where you set the save location, add a 5 or 10 second timer, and choose whether the floating thumbnail appears after you finish.
4
Click Record, then stop from the menu bar
Click Record. For the whole screen, click anywhere to begin; for a portion, the recording starts immediately. When you are done, click the small stop icon in the menu bar at the top right, or press ⇧⌘5 again and click Stop.

QuickTime Player ships on every Mac and has recorded screens for years, so it is the route many people reach for first. On current macOS its New Screen Recording command opens the same ⇧⌘5 controls under the hood, but QuickTime adds a real advantage: it opens the finished clip in a window where you can trim and save it in one place.

1
Open QuickTime and choose File, then New Screen Recording
Launch QuickTime Player from Applications or Spotlight. In the menu bar choose File, then New Screen Recording. The on-screen recording controls appear.
2
Choose your area and microphone
Pick whole screen or a selected portion, exactly like the ⇧⌘5 toolbar. Open Options to select a microphone if you want narration, and to set where the file saves.
3
Record, then stop from the menu bar
Click Record and do whatever you need to capture. Click the stop icon in the menu bar when you finish. QuickTime opens the recording in its own window.
4
Trim, then save
To cut dead time off the start or end, choose Edit, then Trim (or press ⌘T), drag the yellow handles, and click Trim. Then choose File, then Save to write the final .mov.

By default, both built-in methods save to the Desktop as a .mov file. To change that, open the ⇧⌘5 toolbar, click Options, and pick a folder under Save to. QuickTime remembers the last place you saved from its own Save dialog.

Screen recordings are large. macOS encodes them with H.264 at your display resolution and frame rate, so a couple of minutes at Retina resolution can run to hundreds of megabytes. Two things keep the size down: recording a selected portion instead of the whole screen, and trimming the clip so you are not storing the ten seconds it took you to get set up. QuickTime trims in place; for the ⇧⌘5 toolbar, click the floating thumbnail right after you stop and drag the trim handles there.

The built-in tools capture the screen accurately, but a raw recording is flat: the cursor is a tiny arrow lost in a sea of pixels, the important detail is too small to read, and there is silence where the app audio should be. Editing all of that by hand is the reason most people dread making a demo. Kapshot is a native macOS app that does the recording and the cleanup in one pass.

1
Start recording in one click
Open Kapshot and click record. Choose the whole screen, a window, or a region. System audio and your microphone are captured together by default, so app sound and narration both land in the file with nothing extra to install.
2
Let the auto-zoom follow your cursor
As you work, Kapshot smoothly pushes the view in wherever your pointer is active and eases back out when you move on. A plain screen recording becomes a guided product demo, and you never touch a keyframe. It reads your cursor motion, so the zoom feels intentional rather than jumpy.
3
Let it clean the clip up
When you stop, Kapshot trims the idle moments and steadies the motion automatically, so you are not scrubbing a timeline to cut the first few seconds of fumbling.
4
Export with no watermark
Export at the resolution you need for a landing page, a changelog, Slack, or social. There is no watermark, ever, and nothing is uploaded to a cloud. The file stays on your Mac.

A Kapshot recording with cursor-following auto-zoom and no manual editing.

Both record your screen. The difference is everything that happens around the recording: whether the view follows your work, whether you spend time editing afterward, and whether the finished file carries a watermark.

To be clear, the built-in recorder is genuinely good and it is free with your Mac. If you only need an occasional quick clip and you are fine narrating with your mic, ⇧⌘5 is all you need. Kapshot earns its keep when you make recordings regularly and want them to look deliberate without an editing session every time.

Not everything needs a video. When a single still frame makes the point, Kapshot handles that too. It wraps your screenshots in a background, a real macOS window frame with the traffic-light buttons, and a proper shadow, so a flat capture turns into something you would put in a deck or a landing page. One app covers both jobs: recordings that look like demos, and screenshots that look designed.

If screenshots are what you are really after, here is how to screenshot on a MacBook, with the keyboard shortcuts and where the files land.