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Comment by philliphaydon | Hacker News Reader

I switched to insomnia when postman changed their pricing pulling the rug out from everyone wanting us to pay like $300 more per month. (Before they back tracked)

https://insomnia.rest/

I actually prefer it.

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One thing I love from Insomnia.rest is the ability to import CURL commands, including an entire list of newline-delimited CURL commands from the clipboard. This makes it easier to modify XHR's you pulled from your browser via a right click -> "copy all as cURL (bash)".

Yup. Use this all the time, either when I want to automate something on an undocumented API, or if I want to do some basic security testing on API's at work.

Postman can do this as well. I've been using this a bunch recently due to some project limitations and it has made life so much easier.

ETA: I just tried the functionality on Insomnia and I have to admit the UX is nicer. Just paste into the URL bar. Whereas with Postman it's CMD+O, Click on "Raw Text", click in textarea, paste, press import. Insomnia looks to have added OpenAPI support too (it was missing it last time I played with it) so maybe it's time to re-evaluate Insomnia

Postman's UI is cluttered

I don't disagree. I've just been using it for so long (8 or 9 years now I think) and it's so ingrained in my workflows that I haven't bothered to re-evaluate it in ages. This is probably the kick in the butt I needed.

The world is your oyster, my friend. Restfox is pretty similar to Insomnia, which is what I use, so I'll probably give Restfox a shot and see about hosting my own instance on the LAN.

OP states they built this because they wanted a portable version of Insomnia.

Same, my team and I started using Insomnia too when Postman pulled that stunt; doesn't matter if they went back on, good will lost in that way is a bridge burned that can't be rebuilt.

Same here, switched from postman to insomnia when it became impossible to ignore how slow, cluttered and generally bloated it became. Haven’t missed it since. Insomnia is pretty great. I’m sure there’s lots of stuff that postman can do that insomnia can’t, but insomnia is still very capable, while being snappy and not being in the way. Highly recommend it.

Same here, moved from postman to insomnia, now mostly using the rest plugin for visual studio code. Prefer using regular text files.

I similarly use restclient.el on Emacs and love it.

For those unfamiliar with these plugins, they allow you to simply write text files looking like:

    GET https://example.com/posts/5
    Accept: application/json

    POST https://example.com/posts
    Content-Type: application/json
    Authorization: Bearer abc

    {"title": "foo", "body": "bar"}

and simply execute the requests from the buffer.

There's one built into the JetBrains editors, too. And the upcoming release is going to allow one to wrap very long URLs for better visibility and include fun things like "$random.email" in the request: https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2022/10/intellij-idea-2022-3... (EAP releases are always free of charge, if one wanted to play with it right now; just please report bugs if you find them, as that's the reason they're free)

I have been using Thunder client in vs code. Love not having another app. Postman is horrible now.

Moved from Postman to Insomnia too. Postman was taking too much time to start and was very unresponsive compared to Insomnia, on my Work Laptop.

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