Wireshark’s Welcome Screen

Wireshark 1.2 added a nifty welcome screen which lets you start capturing, load a capture file, get help, and lots of other things. At the very top of the screen we brag about our popularity.

You can change that message to anything you like.

If you’re running Windows

  • Go to About→Wireshark→Folders.
  • Double-click on Personal Configuration.
  • Open preferences with a text editor, such as Notepad. Not a word processor, such as Word. This is a plain text file. Notepad good. Word bad. Very, very bad.

If you’re running OS X, Linux, or similar

  • Open ~/.wireshark/preferences in a text editor.

Now that you’re deep in the bowels of your preferences file

  • Find the following block of text:
# Custom start page title.
gui.start_title: The World's Most Popular Network Protocol Analyzer
# Show version in start page, can be useful in custom builds.
# TRUE or FALSE (case-insensitive).
gui.version_in_start_page: FALSE
  • Change gui.start_title to your custom message.
  • If you’d like the version to show up, change gui.version_in_start_page to TRUE.
  • Save the file and exit your editor.
  • Restart or start Wireshark.

Et voilà:

New title

This entry was posted in Tip.