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.
this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2025
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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.
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
That's not what the Github ticket says.
Servers can see the incoming IP address for a request, that is personal data.
But is it stored?
Yes, it's sent to posthog.
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.
I never knew it had telemetry, this fork of it I haven't tried apparently doesn't though: https://github.com/Its-treason/bruno
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~~Import our Postman library.~~ ❌
Clone our curl repo. ✅
... -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
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.
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.
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.
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meh, use whatever the fuck you want
there, I can swear too
Total feelings of superiority: immeasurable.
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.
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.
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.
Wish I knew how to copy / paste a multi line in windows.
Just use netcat
What about doing grpc / protobuf stuff
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