In the last tip, I mentioned that iOS Simulator screenshots and screen captures can be taking using the terminal commands

xcrun simctl io booted screenshot ~/Desktop/screenshot.png

and

xcrun simctl io booted recordVideo ~/Desktop/screencapture.mov

respectively.

With regard to iPhoneX and other iPhones with a notch, the option --mask can be very useful:

  • ignored applies no mask, thus a fully rendered image with no corner or notch markings. This is the default value.
  • alpha applies an alpha mask with the corners and notch rendered transparent.
  • black applies a black mask with the corners and notch rendered black.
xcrun simctl io booted screenshot --mask alpha ~/Desktop/screenshot.png
ignored alpha black

Similarly, a screen capture can be taken using

xcrun simctl io booted recordVideo --mask black ~/Desktop/screencapture.mov

however only ignored and black are valid values.

Note that other image and video file formats are supported, png, tiff, bmp, gif and jpeg for images and h264, mp4 and fmp4 for videos, defaulting to png and mp4 respectively.

This post was generated from a GitHub repository.