Loom Recording Control Shortcuts

Starting a recording has no single universal keyboard shortcut across every Loom installation — the primary trigger is clicking Loom's own menu bar icon (Mac) or system tray icon (Windows), which opens the recording setup panel for choosing what to capture (full screen, a specific window, or webcam only) before the actual recording begins. Some versions of the desktop app do allow assigning a custom global shortcut for starting a recording through the app's own settings, which is worth setting up specifically if you record frequently enough that reaching for the mouse and finding the tray icon each time becomes a genuine point of friction. Pausing and resuming (Ctrl+Shift+P on Windows, Cmd+Shift+P on Mac, though this exact binding has varied somewhat across app versions) is the one recording-control action with a consistent, dedicated keyboard shortcut, and understanding exactly what it does matters: pausing stops capturing screen and audio entirely without ending the recording session, letting you deal with an interruption, collect your thoughts, or step away briefly, then resume exactly where you left off. Critically, this doesn't create a separate video clip — the paused gap simply isn't included in the final recording at all, and when you eventually stop, Loom produces one single continuous video with that gap invisibly removed, as if it had never happened. Stopping a recording (Ctrl+Shift+S on Windows, Cmd+Shift+S on Mac) ends the current session entirely and begins processing and uploading the finished video, after which you're taken directly to Loom's post-recording editing and sharing screen — this is a one-way action distinct from pausing; once stopped, resuming isn't possible the way it is from a pause, and continuing to add content means starting an entirely new, separate recording. Toggling your webcam bubble and muting your microphone both remain deliberately click-only actions, controlled through small icons in Loom's floating recording control bar rather than bound to any keyboard shortcut — a genuine design choice consistent with Loom's broader minimal-shortcut philosophy, prioritizing a simple, visually obvious toolbar that anyone can use on their very first recording without needing to have memorized anything beforehand. Restarting a recording from scratch (the Discard button in the recorder toolbar, again with no keyboard shortcut) throws away the current in-progress recording entirely and returns you to the pre-recording setup state — useful the moment a take goes wrong early enough that starting completely over is genuinely faster than trying to salvage or trim around the mistake later in the editor. A practical recording session worth walking through end to end: click the tray or menu bar icon to open setup, choose your capture source, begin recording, use Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+P if you need to pause for an interruption partway through, resume when ready, and finish with Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+S to stop and move into the editing screen — the entire loop deliberately requires learning only two actual keyboard shortcuts, everything else handled through simple, visually obvious toolbar clicks, which is precisely the low-friction design Loom is built around. Worth being explicit about the capture-source choice made at the very start, since it determines what pause, resume, and stop actually apply to for the rest of the session: Loom's setup panel offers full-screen capture, a specific single application window, or webcam-only recording, each producing a genuinely different kind of video suited to a different purpose — full-screen for a broad walkthrough that might touch several applications, a specific window when you want to guarantee nothing else on your desktop is accidentally visible, and webcam-only for a purely personal, face-to-camera message with nothing to show on screen at all. A point worth making about why Loom chose to bind only pause and stop to keyboard shortcuts, leaving start, camera, and mic toggling as click-only actions: starting a recording is inherently a one-time setup action requiring you to first choose a capture source through a visual panel anyway, so a keyboard shortcut wouldn't meaningfully skip that visual step regardless. Camera and mic toggling, meanwhile, are genuinely infrequent mid-recording actions for most users — most people either keep their camera on or off for an entire recording rather than toggling it repeatedly — so the ongoing cost of learning a dedicated shortcut for something used once or twice per recording, if at all, is harder to justify than for pause and stop, which are the two actions most likely to be needed unpredictably and immediately during active recording.