Babyshark
Wireshark made easy (terminal UI for PCAPs)
Details
- External ID
- 47128535
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Babyshark
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- Feb. 23, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 151
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.9299191374663073
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
Hey all, I built babyshark, a terminal UI for PCAPs aimed at people who find Wireshark powerful but overwhelming.The goal is “PCAPs for humans”: Overview dashboard answers what’s happening + what to click nextDomains view (hostnames first) → select a domain → jump straight to relevant flows (works even when DNS is encrypted/cached by using observed IPs from flows)Weird stuff view surfaces common failure/latency signals (retransmits/out-of-order hints, resets, handshake issues, DNS failures when visible)From there you can drill down: Flows → Packets → Explain (plain-English hints) / follow streamCommands: Offline: babyshark --pcap capture.pcapLive (requires tshark): babyshark --list-ifaces then babyshark --live en0Repo + v0.1.0 release: https://github.com/vignesh07/babysharkWould love feedback on UX + what “weird detectors” you’d want next.
Enrichment
- Theme
- self-hosted infrastructure and security tools
- Vertical
- Security
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- network packet analysis terminal ui
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes Building a terminal UI (TUI) in Go or Rust using libraries like Bubbletea or Ratatui to parse and display PCAP packets is well within the capabilities of AI-assisted development.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Wireshark/tshark, sngrep, tcpdump
Concerns raised: CLI barrier for beginners unfamiliar with command-line tools, Potential use of AI/LLM in development raises authenticity questions, Performance concerns with LLM analysis on large PCAP files
Feature requests: Custom tshark one-liner recipes for proprietary/specific use cases, Recipe store with fuzzy matching for sharing tshark commands, Lowercase letter option keys (instead of uppercase)
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 22 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #2 of 23 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 94 days after the earliest competitor.
- CDNShark · ph · 2026-09-18 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- TapeKit · github · 2026-09-13 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- Dsnitch · hn · 2026-09-06 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- Netrinos · hn · 2025-12-19 · 93 upvotes · similarity 0.35
- D.NIX. · ph · 2026-09-20 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.35
- I built a DNS resolver from scratch in Rust · hn · 2026-04-02 · 115 upvotes · similarity 0.33
- TheLittleHost · hn · 2026-03-16 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.32
- TCP chat server written in C# and .NET 9, used in the terminal · hn · 2026-01-03 · 23 upvotes · similarity 0.32
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.