I love it that the page is designed to advertise multiple pieces of software but stopped at curl ^^
More coming soon. Or not. I don't owe you shit.
ffmpeg is definitely also a candidate for this.
this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2025
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One more reason, there is a "copy as cURL" option in the Firefox developer tools network tab. It gives you a perfect cURL command including all the necessary cookies and headers to send the exact HTTP request that your browser just sent.
OMFG I wished I knew about this years ago! Thank you!
Yay, learning!
This is great.
If you like having a postman like interface, I've been using Bruno, which is a local, de-enshittified clone of postman.
I've never thought about just using curl, but when I'll finally migrate for good out of windows to Linux, I will try doing just that, see how that feels.
Bruno has telemetry users can't opt out of: https://github.com/usebruno/bruno/issues/337
Which, IMO, is unacceptable.
I never knew it had telemetry, this fork of it I haven't tried apparently doesn't though: https://github.com/Its-treason/bruno
Wow, what a mess. Personally, I'm fine with this degree of telemetry, trying to understand how many people are using your app has obvious value and isn't a huge concern for me compared to what telemetry usually refers to. This feels like a bit of a "mountain out of a molehill" where the overwhelming quantity of feedback has aggravated the primary dev into being very jaded about the whole topic. I assume he got a lot more flack for this than is still preserved in this thread.
The big thing about Bruno is that nothing is synced to the cloud, so I can use it without worrying about it being a security risk. In addition to being pretty great, and letting me easily distribute a collection in a git repository. For that, it definitely still earns my support as a good tool, whether I'm logged as a "daily active user" or not.
Still, hopefully the main version does get that opt out added, mostly just to remove the black mark from its name and to be properly GDPR compliant.
never noticed! will not recommend in the future. thanks for the heads up.
Its just a visit counter no personal data or application data is stored
Servers can see the incoming IP address for a request, that is personal data.
But is it stored?
Yes, it's sent to posthog.
That's not what the Github ticket says.
Man, we just can't win with these UI tools, I also thought Bruno was the solution. Only use it on my work machine so that's why I guess I never noticed this. Thank you for sharing, time to go back to digging for better alternatives.
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... -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"query": "{ users { name } }"}'? No. Why would you do that when you can just do ... --json '{"query": "{ users { name } }"}'. Yeah curl is awesome.
If you're trying to say that curl isn't he best option for my mom, you're totally right.
For developers, on he other hand...
I believe they are just pointing out a more concise cli option. No value judgment included as far as I can tell.
Yeah tbh I just thought the --json option was pretty neat - I hadn't known about it until fairly recently
~~Import our Postman library.~~ ❌
Clone our curl repo. ✅
The only thing I still use Postman for at work is when running API performance benchmarks, as I wasn't yet motivated enough to write a curl wrapper to do such tests and plot the results. Especially when doing things like ramp up etc. it becomes more than a simple for-loop.
Can someone recommend an existing command line tool for that?
If you are running performance benchmarks, how about using jmeter?
Thank you, from a quick glance it seems to be able to do everything I need. I will try it for my next load test.
Didn't know cURL supports so many protocols
The only point I can say is that editing text on the terminal isn't as simple as a regular text field. And AFAIK the only way to write a query on a regular text editor would be to write it, save to file, run file...
Pressing C-x C-e opens the current commandline in your default editor.
As in what's in your $EDITOR variable. If you haven't touched it, it's most likely Nano or some minimal vim
I find that if your command is complex enough that editing it on the terminal becomes annoying, then there's a very high chance you want it in a file anyways, just to document what you did and to allow easily re-running it.
Having said that, you can also have your shell open the command in your editor of choice: https://www.stefanjudis.com/today-i-learned/edit-long-shell-commands-in-your-usdeditor/
Couldn't you write in the text editor then copy/paste into terminal without saving? (Who needs documentation anyway)
I write in Notepad++ then copy paste to WSL.
curl is not great when testing configuration for various software solutions. there are a few better options than postman like httpie and another one but I forget its name.
ducaale/xh is another much like curl. Closer to postman are Hoppscotch and Insomnia.
ok yeah I think the other one I used was like a fork of insomnia.
Xh is my favorite— a rewrite of httpie with some fixes.
Did you read the full post?
I did and I did not see anything in the article that would take your api and give you an equivalent statement in a variety of languages which I think is why it was nice using the programs but i has been over a year since I did it. It was a fairly high amount of convenience.
isn't this how RMS uses the internet? By cURLing all the URLs?
No, he has his own bizarre approach
I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it.
That's a general statement about that man's existence - he has his own bizarre approach.
Total feelings of superiority: immeasurable.
meh, use whatever the fuck you want
there, I can swear too
Bruno seems significantly less evil . . . for now
Bruno has telemetry users can't opt out of: https://github.com/usebruno/bruno/issues/337
Which is misguided if not evil. Unnaceptable either way, IMO.
Just use netcat
Wish I knew how to copy / paste a multi line in windows.
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