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Comment by ok_dad | Hacker News Reader

Learn and use curl, then you won’t have any issues like this. You can make some scripts in Python or something, too.

I say this because the last three tools I used for this all got shitty (postman, insomnia, and thunder client).

I would rather cycle thorough tools than deal with piss poor user experience of something like that.

Seriously, python with the requests lib in a jupyter notebook is always a nicer user experience than any REST API GUI, most importantly once it's grown a bit.

That sounds interesting. Can you post some example? How do you share 'collections'?

One nice thing about FOSS CLI tools is they're easy to script. While it's pretty tough to script general cases, I often find my workflows orbit around a handful of commands, and scripting often can improve the UX by a large margin. It does require tinkering a bit though.

I really like the built-in `.http` file clients in IntelliJ products. You can paste from CURL and copy to CURL, so interop with CLI commands is very easy.

https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/exploring-http-syntax.ht...

But is there a VS Code extension for curl?!!? Does it work with ChatGPT?

I think you're joking, but I actually want to know these things when adopting tools now to the extent that it's applicable.

im just making fun of web devs

Curl is not sufficient for rapid experimentation against an API.

Depends how comfortable you are with curl and your workflow. I'm much more productive using curl vs any GUI you give me. Still have OpenAPI specs in my projects but curl is much faster initially.

It falls apart instantly when you need to pass data from one endpoint to another or add any sort of logic like filtering through data - so any time you have non-trivial workloads where you don't want to spend half your time fighting against jq or shell.

You don’t have to fight tools if you learn them, but I understand— as a fellow programmer— that you don’t always have time to learn them. However, it’s pretty easy to use pipes and tools like jq to do complex stuff.

While jq is powerful and I use it in scripts, it's one of the least intuitive languages I use, to the point I have to look up basically everything non-trivial.

> pass data from one endpoint to another

`curl ... > out.json` then `curl ... -d out.json`. Wrap it in a shell script for quick iterations.

> filtering through data

`curl ... | jq | grep`. I don't know of any tool that will find what I'm after faster than the shell.

For bootstrapping and quick experiments curl is right there at my fingertips, no need to spin up an electron app, make a bunch of definitions and all that. When I want something more usable OpenAPI serves as stateful and interactive test environment and documentation at the same time.

I do agree curl can get a little verbose but create an alias: `alias jc='curl -H Content-Type: application/json` and using it is as simple as `jc $URL` for GET or `jc -X POST -d '{ ... }' $URL` for the rest of the methods.

I really recommend getting comfortable in the shell, it's amazing how productive it can be and becoming a bit of a lost art these days. All the tools are composable and working together it's so zen.

for individual users, i've not quite got the appeal of postman.

in larger teams, I did see groups of people collaboratively creating various urls/scripts/tests, and putting some docs with them, to help with the dev and testing (mostly qa/test folks). that was, imo, a relatively legitimate use for a full tool like postman.

What's wrong with thunder client?

Weird pricing BS they just started.

Wow, just visited the pricing page https://www.thunderclient.com/pricing

Hadn't noticed this change (I am not a heavy user) but it does look like its heading the postman way. I moved from Postman to Insomnia to Thunder Client. Time for yet another alternative.

Nope

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