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ENH: Allow freezing/halting of capture, to have steady data to explore #551
Description
Is there an existing issue for this?
- I have searched the existing issues.
Describe the solution you'd like
I love sniffnet, great tool!
One thing I'm missing is the ability to halt/freeze/"stop the world" to explore what's been captured in detail.
Right now, the data refreshes every second, making it hard to read/explore. I've looked for such a feature in the docs/help but couldn't find anything.
Is your feature request related to a problem?
I'm always frustrated when I try to read a table and the table rerenders the second I move to another column.
Try staying with the "same" here (semantically the same, not at the same height):
I'm surprised no one else has had this problem yet - I must have missed something obvious, like a pause button, but couldn't find anything.
Reacted by NikolayHD and Giuliano Bellini
Activity
GyulyVGC commentedon Jul 4, 2024
Thanks for your suggestion.
Yes, you're actually the first one to have brought up this kind of concern and there is not a real solution as of now.
However, as you may have noticed, you can sort the table by packets or bytes exchanged and that will give you a much more stable view.
Let me know if this sounds as a possible acceptable workaround.
In case the table isn't sorted, the default behaviour is to show the most recent entries, so it doesn't make much sense to stop it in my opinion; freezing the capture would also be counterintuitive I think because it could introduce some misunderstandings about the status of the capture: the capture is running while the view is freezed.
GyulyVGC commentedon Jul 4, 2024
After better thinking about this one, I came to the following conclusions:
This being said, I think that points 1) and 2) make it clear that there are other solutions to have steady data to explore.
However, being able to stop and later resume the capture could potentially be of interest for other scenarios maybe?
Right now, to achieve this the only workaround is to stop the current analysis and later restart another analysis still from the same network adapter.
Maybe we should understand if there's some case in which users want to pause the ongoing analysis without restarting it.
corneliusroemer commentedon Jul 4, 2024
Thanks for thinking this through!
My idea was to halt the entire capture. Then I can inspect whatever I've captured. So that's version 4 in your list. That's perfectly good!
While there might be workarounds, i.e. using a different program to view what was captured, isn't the whole idea of sniffnet to allow convenient viewing right there 😀
I've discovered the sorting workaround as well, but it's a bit annoying still and imperfect.
DerpaholicRex commentedon Oct 7, 2024
To give an example of why this would be wanted.
I've just started playing around with this tool, and ran into the scenario where i wished to favorite a few connections
However, in the "live" data, this was extremely hard to do as things shifted around as you try to click the star, causing the wrong line to be marked. I would agree that pausing only makes sense with version 4 you mention.
While i figured out the same sort solution, a pause button may be more intuitive in cases like this.
In general i think your correct that a pause is basically a stop and restart from the same network adaptor.
And this means that the main benefit desired from the "pause" seems to be for the previous run data to still be displayed after the stop. As apposed to current behavior, where stopping returns to adaptor selection screen, and data needs to be viewed outside the tool
GyulyVGC commentedon Oct 7, 2024
Thank you @erieflin for your feedback, really appreciated!
dejang commentedon Sep 12, 2025
I'm curious to give this one a try @GyulyVGC, if you're ok with it. If I understand correctly we'd like to pause capturing (which is the same as stopping) but we don't want to clear the results as with "Quit analysis". On resume we would start capturing again and append the incoming data to existing collection.
I think I'd only need to know where the pause/resume button needs to be placed and I could provide a rough implementation we can try out within a few days.
Looking at this page I think I have a few ideas as a starting point to spark some inspiration:
In terms of effort, the most complex one but also the flashiest is the pulsating logo, options 2. The toolbar footer (3) is after because of having to touch a bigger part of the layout but not terrible and I like it probably just as much as option 2. Then there's option 1 and finally option 4.
These are just a few ideas, curious to know your thoughts.
GyulyVGC commentedon Sep 12, 2025
Hey @dejang thanks for your interest and proposals, but I've self-assigned this issue to me since I've already some plans for it and I want to tackle it personally.