How to stop a screen recording on a Mac

Press Command-Control-Escape. That stops a recording made with Shift-Command-5 or QuickTime Player, from any app. You can also click the round stop button in the menu bar, or press Shift-Command-5 again and click the stop button in the toolbar. We tried all three on macOS 27, and each one saved the whole recording.

Last updated: October 2026

Written by the developer of Take, a Mac screen recorder, on 7 October 2026. Every built-in step on this page was tried on a 16-inch MacBook Pro (Mac16,7) on macOS 27.0.1, recording a window of sample text, and every test file was deleted afterwards.

Three ways to stop

1. The shortcut: press Command-Control-Escape. Not Option-Command-Escape, which opens Force Quit.
2. The menu bar: click the round button with a square in it, near the notch.
3. The toolbar: press Shift-Command-5. While a recording runs, the three record buttons are replaced by one stop button. Click it.

The stop button while recording. On our Mac it sat at the left end of the menu bar icons, closest to the notch.

Shift-Command-5 during a recording. The three record buttons become one Stop Screen Recording button.

QuickTime Player's File, New Screen Recording opens the same toolbar on macOS 27, so a recording started from QuickTime stops the same three ways. We stopped one that way with Command-Control-Escape.

When the stop button is not in the menu bar

On our Mac the stop button appeared at the left end of the icons on the right of the menu bar, the spot closest to the notch. When the menu bar is full, that is where icons get pushed out of sight, so the stop button can be the one you cannot see. The shortcut and Shift-Command-5 still work. To make room for good, see menu bar icons hidden behind the notch.

In a full-screen app the menu bar hides until you move the pointer to the top of the screen. The shortcut does not need the menu bar.

Last resort: quit the screenshot tool

If nothing else stops it, open Activity Monitor, search for screencaptureui, select it, click the Quit Process button in the toolbar, then Force Quit. That process draws the toolbar and the stop button, and it is not in the Option-Command-Escape list because it is not a normal app.

We tried this on a recording that had run for 2 minutes 21 seconds, force quitting the process from Terminal. The recording stopped, the full 141.6 second file was saved and played without errors, and macOS started the tool again by itself.

Where the file goes

After you stop, a thumbnail slides into the corner of the screen. The file is written when it leaves, about 5 seconds later in our test, or straight away if you click it. It goes to the Desktop, named Screen Recording with the date and time, unless you chose another place: where screen recordings go on a Mac.

With Take

Take while recording. The left part pauses, the rest stops.

While Take records, its menu bar item turns into a red pill with the time. Click the left part to pause and the rest to stop. From any app, Command-Shift-2 starts and stops a take, and Command-Shift-P pauses it. We stopped our test take with Command-Shift-2.

When you stop, Take trims the start and your reach for Stop on its own, so the moment you spent finding the button is not in the video. It also writes the recording in two-second pieces, so if the app is ever force quit, the take is still playable up to the last piece.

Download Take to try it. Recording and editing are free to try · the 7-day trial starts when you first share · macOS 14 or later

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Keep reading: Screen recording not working · Trim, cut, crop or speed up · Where recordings go · Record with internal audio · Best Mac screen recorders · Take overview