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Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

Postman inhabits this weird niche where it was tons of value when it was free, and now it's wildly not worth the price. The only thing keeping us on Postman was inertia, which this year's invoice has finally sprung us out of, and we're switching to Bruno.

I worry that Bruno will go the same way, as that's also what Insomnia did.

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'hoppscotch' is another one doing stupid shit: https://github.com/hoppscotch/hoppscotch/pull/3266

Can't believe we almost switched to that to get away from Postman. At this point, I'd rather have a text file full of curl commands, because httpie looks about ready to spring an Enterprise tier as well.

And what is wrong with (a well-structured hierarchy of folders containing) text files (i.e. scripts) full of curl commands? You can also track and version them in git, automate them, etc.

Genuinely asking of course, because I never got the "point" of Postman vs. curl, except maybe for non-technical people.

A UI is much more discoverable than CLI arguments.

Skimmable perhaps, man pages exist even if people don't like to read them.

Is your argument that a man page is more discoverable than a UI?

I have had that experience, yes. Contrast poking around with PuTTY vs man ssh.

Man pages have prose, examples, 'see also' notes.

They surely could put some cheat sheets at the beginning but that doesn't excuse a resistance to reading them.

GUI is slightly nicer UI for many including myself if you need to iterate over things like parameters, headers, paths and even body data.

Curl is perfectly fine for some repeatable copy paste, but if you need to change bits by bits I feel GUI brings lot of benefits.

A folder of text files is what my team does, using https://github.com/Huachao/vscode-restclient

You should give Bruno a shot - https://www.usebruno.com/

Relevant HN thread - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39653718

Bruno is just another open core product using claims of open source for marketing, it seems.

> Majority of our features are free and open source (which covers REST and GraphQL Apis)

Try submitting a PR for websockets or GRPC support and see what happens.

4 thumbs down and a frown emoji are “too heated” and close the PR? What horrible way to handle things. Another one bites the dust…

If I was a hoppscotch user, I'd fork the project from this person's PR and never look back.

It really feels something so simple that in the end mostly open source free tool done as hobby could do most of the functionality. Leveraging some existing open source tool...

And they do. There are a ton of clones.

Can you name them?

Insomnia, Hoppscotch, Bruno, HTTPie are a few.

I end up using it just because the team does. I much prefer curl for most things.

I do security stuff. So I get paid Burp License... So I just end up using that myself.

If I implement or integrate with something myself yeah I just do curl too. Or more complex case python.

It's the circle of life.

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