More coming soon. Or not. I don't owe you shit.
this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2025
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That was a fun read! I don't even know what Postman is but I do like curl :P
Be glad you don't know what Postman is.
The only reason I bother is because some PMs want to use it.
Look at Bruno. Its open source, though I did get pay walled the other day and it pissed me off.
I thought this article was complaining about something that no-one used, but here you are recommending alternatives... alternatives that are not curl
Check out yaak, also open source no paywall. Built on Tauri so not a dumb electron app
Yaak has a commercial paywall if you use the pre-built binaries. You can easily build it yourself without licensing tho
Generally not a big fan of this type of writing especially when it's so wrong.
I'm an old software dev who grew up with curl but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone new. It's extremely dated UX that takes a long time to figure all of the quirks out. You will fail thousand times over and is a http client CLI really worth days of your time learning?
Libcurl itself is brilliant but there are much better front ends for it like hurl or alternatives like httpie - use those instead.
Wow the httpie site is terrible
Hahahahaha you're not wrong
Yes it is worth it, because it is available everywhere, and will still be around in 15 years. Learn it once, use it "forever", everywhere. It's the same with learning to use sed, awk, etc. They've been around for 50 years and will most likely be for another 50.
It's just a http client CLI not a programming language. It's not that difficult to switch. In fact I use at least 5 different ones myself.
All the more reason to learn and use curl
Yes after you learn all better clients first, sure.
Which do you consider better?
...probably the ones they mentioned in the root comment?
Same here, though last time I used a nice frontend was in 2010s, it stopped being developed like all these smaller projects finally end up, and I'm back to using curl. Perhaps it's time to try again, httpie has been around for a while so maybe it's here to stay
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Command line escaping is an annoying son of a bitch and different rules apply depending if you're using bash, cmd, powershell.
That's why you shouldn't use cmd or powershell. That and the fact that you'd have to install W*nd*ws in order to use them.
Edit: Too bad that all the downvoters didn't leave a comment. Now I'll never know if it was M*cr*s*ft employees on their anual works outing, or if you're mad because I dared to use the W-word :D
String escaping sucks in bash and other posix-style shells too, though.
"Tru dat\!"
I hate windows/microsoft as much as anyone and i hate to say this but powershell isn’t that bad and can be installed on Linux and MacOS
Yeah but why would you, they already have proper shells
Thanks, I didn't know that. And now I wish I could forget it again.
Command line escaping is not a solely cmd or powershell thing to deal with. But also,
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You can pry wget from my cold, dead hands.
they are different things, wget and curl do not have many overlapping use cases other than downloading stuff over http
This is beautiful. I'ma send this to my coworkers.
With none other than...
Outlook. In HTML format. With a giant signature that includes an embedded image.
Also the image is a 2400px image that has been resized using width and height attributes.
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As a daily curl user, this made me interested in trying out postman.
There are less bloated alternatives I prefer. Like Bruno, which is easy/easier to version control.
Thanks for mentioning Bruno! It looks awesome. I haven't tried it out, but I'm going to give it a shot today.
I just downloaded it, there's even an appimage 😍
It will upload your credentials to the cLoUd and ask you for payment to do basic things. Completely enshittified.
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That's great. I like a GUI. I also do not like whatever postman is. So I have to suffer until I find something that works for me
Httpie desktop? Bruno https://www.usebruno.com/?
Bruno Looks interesting. I think the last time I read about it it was very new, I might need to give it another try. I hope it will not end up like postman or insomnia.
The first thing I see when opening the httpie app website is a "we now have ai" pop-up. So probably not that one.
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Is there one of these for shell scripts over CI/CD frameworks?
This is such a weird article. Electron is not for making http requests, it's for rendering web pages. Nothing within curl can render web pages. I'm not saying you should be using electron necessarily, but this is just so obviously wrong, what is the author thinking?
And (almost) any programming language has a built-in primitive for making http requests (possibly even using libcurl internally), why would I switch to a command line call if I can just do the http call directly with that primitive?
I think it's a jab at Postman, which is essentially curl with a GUI.
Postman has Collection Runner tho, which is useful for people that like to dick around on a GUI and get their data harvested and used for AI training instead of writing their own script in Python.
I'm very early stages on making my own TUI for http requests that's shortcut based. Idea is to use Jetbrains format http files. Folders for projects, sidebar for requests etc.
Supports environments and I'm hoping I can set up the main screen to use Vim.
It's born out of postman hate mostly. It's just so bloated
curl is obviously fantastic but for more complex ad-hoc requests I usually prefer httpie.
It's been awhile since I had to deal with web requests. Back then I used Postman (back when I still used Windows). Now I try to always get by using the simplest open source tools for the job so thanks for sharing, will try it out.
I knew of curl but always thought of it as a tool to play around when doing simple requests, never knew people go so far with it.
IIRC postman has gRPC support, unlike httpie, but it's also so awful. If you use the gRPC support, switch to Kreya instead
The few times I’ve used Postman, I found myself doing everything I needed in Python shortly afterwards. It’s not cURL, but it could easily be such; I prefer the self organized “text” interface of code.
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