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Comment by cyberferret | Hacker News Reader

I was a long time Postman user, but find myself using Insomnia more and more in recent months.

Nothing wrong with Postman at all, but I just like Insomnia's cleaner and less cluttered UI. However, even as a regular user, sometimes I find the 'Send' button can be a lot more prominent than it is. The green '200 OK' response next to the Send button looks more like a button, and I keep inadvertently clicking on it to send my requests off!

And when starting out with a fresh workspace, the 'Create New' prompt looks like a button that you can click to create a new query, but it isn't - you still have to use the hotkey to do so. Small improvements in the UI like that will go a long way to making this my default 'go to' API testing tool.

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One nice feature of Insomnia, that I was pleasantly surprised by, was the ability to export and import your environment settings along with specific API end points. It makes getting up and running for an entire team a bit easier. Sharing is caring.

I'm a long time Postman user as well, I'm still using the Chrome app version because I like having it open in multiple tabs - I can quickly compare responses from Dev/Prod by switching tabs.

Does Insonmia or other REST clients support tabs?

Long-time Paw user here. I prefer it over this or Postman, but I agree that there are horses for courses. Paw lets you easily switch between a bunch of different requests, supports many auth schemes, can import the “copy as curl” right from your clipboard, can generate code for many languages (including curl), has a nice JSON viewer as a tree or as highlighted and formatted text, etc etc: https://paw.cloud

I also like the collab features and ability to save the API spec alongside the source code if you wish. They also have some cloud sharing for teams that I haven’t played with.

I stopped using Paw because it’s macOS only. I work across multiple operating systems and that was very limiting.

Actually, there is something wrong with Postman. It didn't affect the Chrome version but the standalone has a serious bug where it just completely ignores your hosts file. There's been a Github issue for it for over a year but they haven't bothered to fix it.

Personally, I prefer Postman but because of that bug it's basically useless for me.

Sorry about that issue. We have been working on the migration from the Chrome app to the Electron based app for a while. The final set of changes in the runtime went through in v5.4 (collection level auth, variables, scripts etc.). Changes closer to the network layer will start trickling in through soon. It seems like a long time for a bug, but we have been releasing version updates almost every 2-3 weeks. :)

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