Windows 11 beta changes what the Print Screen button does after 33 years

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.

In the current version of Windows 11, the Windows-Shift-S key combo is used to pull up the Snipping Tool, and it will presumably continue to work that way for those who have committed it to memory or whose keyboards don't have a Print Screen key. You can also disable the new Print Screen setting in the keyboard accessibility settings, reverting to the '90s-era behavior.

Microsoft frequently tests new UI designs and default settings in its Windows Insider Preview builds that don't make it into the version of Windows available to the general public. It's possible that Microsoft will revert this change in a future beta, electing to keep the Print Screen button working the way it currently does.