things like oauth, binary websockets, loads of headers, etc all are way worse in curl than others. postman is terrible but there are plenty of other gui/cli options
this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2025
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I want to read more, but sadly curl is the only article on the site.
Or don't. Alternatives are available - often with nicer interfaces!
IMO the main reason to use curl is that Chrome lets you copy web requests as a curl command line.
I use xh. It's quite nice.
I did not know that postman existed. Knowing that made my life worse.
It's gotten even worse when they moved completely to the cloud like a year or two ago! You now can't use it without making a Postman account, and all your API collections are stored on their servers :) Absolutely no security risks here, API endpoints of in-development systems aren't a massive attack vector at all !!
We had to ban the whole tool at my company, the alternative of choice is Bruno because it's at least completely local when you install it.
How so
Because it's awful
What makes you say that though... What specifically about it do you find awful? I prefer xh on the off times I need to test an API, but I remember sometimes it was nice to be able to save API calls as a set, like in the GUI programs.
API calls can be saved as a set with curl too. It's called folders (or in my case, shell scripts where each call is a bash function).
Let's be honest, that's not really the same thing, is it. Not as easy to work with. It's been a while since I used a GUI like that but I remember it being much easier to manipulate query parameters and post body etc with a GUI. At least according to me. 🤷♂️
Pretty much everything said on the website... I'm a hardcore cli, max. tui user. Using electron is torture.
😁 I feel you, I'm pretty much the same.
Would be neat to have a TUI query suite where you could organize an API in a similar way. If anybody knows one, drop it below! 🙏
maybe there's an nvim plugin?
That would be neat. I migrated to Helix a couple years ago though.
Kind of like Ruby on Rails
I offer a compromise of using python's requests library. It's got most of the listed benefits, but I like python better than shell scripting.
It's weird that I've been seeing job posts that list postman as a required skill. It's not great.
I did use "Bruno" for a while to have a GUI for making requests. It was fine.