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Comment by geerlingguy | Hacker News Reader

Also putting this out there—for nicer REST API interaction on the CLI, and a little more user-friendliness, you might also want to add HTTPie[1] to your toolbelt.

It's not going to replace curl or wget usage, but it is a nicer interface in certain circumstances.

[1] https://github.com/jkbrzt/httpie

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HTTPie is amazing for working with JSON/REST interfaces. It's really succinct and generally designed with user-friendliness in mind, versus supporting every nook and cranny of the HTTP RFCs. It's installable via homebrew for Mac users.

Whenever I go back to curl I feel the same minor aggravation I do when moving from homebrew back to apt (want to install? apt-get. Search? apt-cache search. List? dpkg. Remove? apt-get again, for some reason). It's just not a very user-friendly CLI and I'm constantly pulling up the curl man pages.

Arch Linux has pacman, which is a single program that does all of the things you need from a package manager. OpenSUSE systems have zypper, which also has one command for everything (and has a much more reliable format -- rpm).

How is RPM a more reliable format than dpkg? I've worked with both systems as part of writing a program that generates pacman/dpkg/RPM packages, and I've found dpkg to be the most sane and well-designed of the three, while the RPM format is a horrible and under-documented atrocity.

I meant more reliable than Arch Linux's format. I haven't really worked with dpkg much, so I can't comment.

> want to install? apt-get. Search? apt-cache search. List? dpkg. Remove? apt-get again, for some reason

I think this is largely why aptitude exists; a single unified command for all common package tasks. Most of the Debian docs have been switched over to recommend its usage, but for some reason Ubuntu hasn't followed suit. That said, I just keep using the same old shell aliases I added in 2003 personally.

On Debian these days, they provide an executable named apt that does all the common stuff in one place (install, search, list (mimicks dpkg), remove, show, etc.).

I've been loving HTTPie, and for my somewhat idiosyncratic usage it's completely replaced curl and wget. (Of course, most people probably don't spend as much time as me fiddling with poorly documented third party REST APIs.)

Also amazing: jq.

I use httpie for interacting with APIs and aria2c for downloading stuff. They're both perfect at their respective jobs.

This is an extremely minor quibble, but the dependency on Python makes me less inclined to use it. I'm stuck on Windows for a lot of the work I do so configuring Python is never fun and there is no one line installation method from what I can tell.

Putting it up on chocolatey[0] might be a good idea. Not sure how feasible that is however.

[0] https://chocolatey.org/packages?q=httpie

I've never needed to do more configuration for python than whatever the installer does. What problem are you having?

I've had enough problems in the past that I try to steer clear at this point. I don't do much with python so it's hard to justify spending much time on it. I think my bigger issue is the lack of being able to do cinst httpie

The key is to stick with Python 2.7. Unfortunately pyhon 3 has significantly damaged the brand. Also installing msysgit will give you git and the msys command line which is a nice easy to install mostly UNIX command line. It is not a beast like cygwin.

With msysgit (for git and msys) you can practically live in the command line on Windows and with python 2.7 the py things mostly just work. pywin32 helps for some things and if pip install doesn't work there's always the unofficial windows binaries:

http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/

That's true of running just about any command-line tool on Windows. We were promised an ecosystem of Powershell modlets that operate on objects rather than text, but that hasn't really happened.

Any time I'm critical of Windows treatment of CLIs, I'm either met with "Why would I need a CLI, it's not the 80s" or "PowerShell is vastly superior to bash". The issue keeping the MS world from adopting adequate text only tools seems to be much more related to developer mindset than anything technical.

I think it's the mindset of not being involved in open-source mostly.

Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10418882 (that's the thread where I first found out about httpie)

Should have lead that comment with "I'm on Windows, so".

Of course it's going to be miserable to use any command-line tool on Windows. It's Windows.

I'm not sure why you feel like that, I switched back to Windows after ~1 year of using OSX, I wouldn't say its "miserable" there is really nothing I could do in OSX's command line that can't do in windows.

What is your Windows command-line environment? Plain CMD prompt or Cygwin? Or something else?

I don't get agree with your parent, but I used cygwin when I was on Windows and it mostly does what you want if you just need basic command line tools.

The major annoyances were packages were limited, compiling anything was generally a disaster and file permissions between linux/windows are a mess. I happily used it everyday though.

Powershell is very powerful and for windows it beats cygwin/mingw. Not quite sure how it measure against Linux shells running on Linux, but Microsoft has really made a proper shell for windows, too bad it looks so different.

Obviously if you work in a cross-platform environment, cygwin/mingw is still the only thing that will provide you some sort of consistency in your workflow on Windows machines.

I use git bash, with conemu, to be honest I don't do anything crazy but most of the linux commands I need day to day just work.

I feel like you can't have really scratched the surface on what you can do in a real Unix shell. I doubt that Windows has support for things I use all the time (like command substitution <(some command) where the output of a command appears to be a file to a program).

I doubt you've used Powershell. Using objects on the cmdline is pretty ballin.

I feel wget in PowerShell is useful.

PS> $page = wget http://www.yahoo.com/ PS> $page.Images | sort width | select src, width, height | Export-Csv -Encoding utf8 images.CSV

+1; I likely wouldn't be able to just jump on any host and copy/paste some commands that worked from my laptop with this, but I can do that with curl and assume that it's installed and of a reasonably serviceable version basically everywhere I'd be.

I had the same quibble, was going to write my own but found and now use bat.

https://github.com/astaxie/bat/blob/master/README.md

I don't use Windows but I also dislike python dependencies if I can get away with just needing libc.

I use the Babun Shell [0] on Windows desktops to provide an environment for tools more typically found and used in a Unix-like environment.

I know it's not the same as installing a tool natively, but it lets me a) use some tools pretty much in the way I prefer to do so and b) check out stuff that I see on HN (and elsewhere) without a PITA install.

Installing was a one line deal if pip is installed (pip install --upgrade httpie), which in turn was a one line installation (wget https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py -O - | python)

That's pretty close to one line.

[0] https://babun.github.io/

Relevant GitHub Issue: https://github.com/jkbrzt/httpie/issues/58

Ha, I just got to using `jq` regularly (which is already a huge improvement). Now this ..

I find httpie's lack of manpage quite disturbing though.

https://github.com/jkbrzt/httpie/issues/248

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