Download VisualEther Community Edition
Free for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Turn Wireshark PCAP captures into readable sequence diagrams in minutes.
VisualEther Community Edition
Free for Windows, macOS, and Linux. The Community Edition runs whenever no license is installed — sequence diagrams are limited to 10 pages and 10 entities. Request a 45-day Professional trial to unlock session tracking, the MCP server for Claude Code, and unlimited output.
Install with winget, the package manager built into Windows 10 and 11:
winget install EventHelix.VisualEtherUpgrade later with winget upgrade EventHelix.VisualEther. Or download the signed installer directly:
Windows 10 and later · x86_64. Requires Wireshark for the tshark dissector — version 4.6 or later recommended.
Install from the EventHelix Homebrew tap:
brew install eventhelix/tap/visualetherUpgrade later with brew upgrade visualether. Or download the signed disk image directly:
Apple Silicon (arm64) only. Homebrew also installs Wireshark’s tshark automatically.
Ubuntu & Debian (apt)
Register the EventHelix repository once, then install:
curl -fsSL https://downloads.eventhelix.com/apt/eventhelix.gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/eventhelix.gpg
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/eventhelix.gpg] https://downloads.eventhelix.com/apt stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/eventhelix.list
sudo apt update && sudo apt install visualetherFedora (dnf)
Register the repository once, then install:
sudo curl -fsSL https://downloads.eventhelix.com/rpm/eventhelix.repo -o /etc/yum.repos.d/eventhelix.repo
sudo dnf install visualetherOr download a package directly:
Ubuntu 22.04+ / Debian 12+ / current Fedora · x86_64. The packages pull in Wireshark’s tshark automatically, and the repository stays registered so future upgrades go through apt / dnf normally. A distro’s stock Wireshark can lag well behind upstream (Ubuntu 24.04 ships 4.2.2); VisualEther works best with Wireshark 4.6 or later, since older builds silently miss the newest dissector fields. If tshark --version reports an older release, install a current build from wireshark.org or, on Ubuntu, the ppa:wireshark-dev/stable PPA.
Prerequisites
- A computer running Windows 10/11 (x86_64), macOS on Apple Silicon (arm64), or Linux — Ubuntu 22.04+, Debian 12+, or current Fedora (x86_64)
- Wireshark — 4.6 or later recommended. VisualEther reads captures through Wireshark's
tsharkdissector, and the newest protocol fields exist only in recent releases. An older build won't error out — it silently produces degraded or empty diagrams. Homebrew and the Linux packages pulltsharkin automatically; on Windows, install it yourself. - A terminal —
visualetheris a command-line tool that installs onto yourPATH
Get started
- Install VisualEther for your platform using the picker above (winget, Homebrew, apt, or dnf).
- Confirm Wireshark's
tsharkis on yourPATHand is 4.6 or newer:
Some Linux distros still ship 4.2 (e.g. Ubuntu 24.04 → 4.2.2). On an older build, the newest protocol fields are silently missing, so upgrade Wireshark — see the Linux note above.tshark --version - Bootstrap your first project from a built-in sample and generate a diagram:
visualether new bgp cd bgp visualether generate - Build templates for your own captures with help from the manual — open it locally with:
or read the User's manual online. On Professional / Server, let Claude Code drive the workflow through the built-in MCP server:visualether manual
Using a different MCP client? See Use VisualEther with any MCP client for Cursor, Windsurf, VS Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Claude Desktop, and Zed setup.visualether mcp install --scope project
Bundled fonts (optional)
VisualEther embeds the fonts it needs, so most users never download these. Grab an archive only for fully self-contained offline PDF rendering, or for CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) glyph coverage. Choose .tar.gz on Linux / macOS or .zip on Windows.
All bundles are Noto fonts from Google, released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. They are split into two archives by size:
- Latin + RTL (~1.9 MB) — Noto Sans (Latin: regular, bold, italic, bold-italic), Noto Sans Arabic (regular + bold), Noto Sans Hebrew (regular + bold), and Noto Sans Devanagari (regular + bold). Covers Western-European, right-to-left (Arabic, Hebrew), and Devanagari (Hindi, Marathi, …) text in your diagrams.
- CJK (~84 MB) — Noto Sans SC (Simplified Chinese), Noto Sans JP (Japanese), and Noto Sans CJK KR (Korean), plus bold CJK weights. Only needed when your captures carry Chinese, Japanese, or Korean text.
Verify a download against SHA256SUMS.txt — e.g. sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS.txt on Linux / macOS, or Get-FileHash on Windows.
Prefer to source the fonts yourself? These are the standard Google Noto families — get them from Google Fonts, the Noto project site, or your operating system's font packages (on Linux, fonts-noto and fonts-noto-cjk). Drop the .ttf / .otf files into VisualEther's fonts directory and they are picked up the same way.
Download archive
Older releases of VisualEther. Versions 7.2 and earlier are the legacy .NET edition for Windows; the cross-platform release above (9.x) supersedes them.