Babyshark
Wireshark made easy (terminal UI for PCAPs)
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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.
HN · launched Feb 23, 2026 · 151 upvotes (top 7%) · 0 views
Niche: network monitoring and diagnostics tools · 193 launches, 11 in the last 7 days ▼ -35% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Security
- Dev tools
- Developer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 193 launches in network monitoring and diagnostics tools →
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 : 35 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #3 of 36 (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 0.42
- TapeKit · github · 2026-09-13 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- Dsnitch · hn · 2026-09-06 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- Netrinos · hn · 2025-12-19 · 93 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- D.NIX. · ph · 2026-09-20 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.35
- Secure Pipes 2.0 · ph · 2026-10-13 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.34
- Net Chek · ph · 2026-10-05 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.34
- I built a DNS resolver from scratch in Rust · hn · 2026-04-02 · 115 upvotes · similarity 0.33
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