[paozac]

I used to like Postman, when it was a simple browser extension. I basically used it as a curl gui. Now

> Postman is an API platform for building and using APIs. Postman simplifies each step of the API lifecycle and streamlines collaboration so you can create better APIs—faster.

I guess I’m no longer their target user. Back to curl/httpie.

[lucideer]

I used to like Postman until it locked me out of my locally-stored data while I was offline (testing my own applications on localhost) for an extended period , I found out that it phones home constantly (cannot be disabled) & locks you out if it fails. The developers stating they had no intention of changing this for "security reasons" before closing the Github issue sealed the deal.

[kaszanka]

This sounds unbelievable but it seems to be true? https://github.com/postmanlabs/postman-app-support/issues/10...

[tluyben2]

It is also buggy, resource hog and instable. I use it on Ubuntu and os x m1 and I often have to kill it because it stops accepting any inputs or it ate all memory (and cpu after that when you click anything). Hoppscotsch and others are better now: I guess they wanted way too much too fast (I did not check but I suppose they got VC money?)?

[quambene]

Can confirm. Unfortunately, Postman is too resource-hungry (on Ubuntu). Launching is taking a while as well.

I have to admit I'm quite surprised that VS Code (which is also an electron app) is relatively fast and resource-sensitive. Having open a few applications in my daily workflow, moderate resource consumption is getting an important selling point for me.

[BiteCode_dev]

Incidently, httpie is getting a GUI: https://github.com/httpie/desktop

[skrebbel]

And VC funding!

[eatonphil]

I'm building a desktop app that lets you query HTTP APIs but also databases and files. So definitely something you can use as a simple curl GUI. The big benefit of this tool though is that you can script and graph results as well.

Always happy for any feedback!

https://github.com/multiprocessio/datastation

[chin7an]

Paw[0] is a pretty good native macOS option, at least for now. They were acquired sometime last year by RapidAPI[1], and since have released electron based versions of their app for Linux and Windows.

I’m really hoping they don’t go the 1Password route and kill their native macOS product to move everyone to the cross-platform one.

[0] https://paw.cloud/ [1] https://rapidapi.com/

[jim180]

No, we are not gonna kill native macOS app![0]

[0] I'm lead developer for macOS app :)

[robofanatic]

I wonder how much of that was driven by the silicon valley VC culture. You won't get funding if you don't show growth and "innovation", which means catering to all kinds of users resulting into a bloated product with lots of bells and whistles.

[adam_arthur]

The UX has gotten noticeably worse for me. Maybe I'm using it wrong, but now you have to setup a project and name things before you can actually start issuing requests.

And I found the whole experience a bit confusing in terms of user flow

[cyral]

It really needs some love in the UX department. There are so many icons and toolbars it is hard to understand where to find things or why they are placed where they are.

[ljm]

New law: Any novel product with VC funding will inevitably grow a vestigial CMS.

[mattbuilds]

I used to use Postman but now I prefer to just build my own scripts in Python. I use the requests library and can setup things however I want.

[anyfactor]

Same here. I am not sure where would I even use postman for. I essentially would wait 3-5 minutes to have postman initialized, be greeted with a dialogue box for an update or something, drop a json file for the headers and skim through the output.

But it takes seconds to get up and running with requests-html. And it can do anything Postman can do and more. I have no idea how people in organizations use postman though.

[sillyquiet]

Same story here. Postman just got too feature-rich for my blood.

curl + bloomRPC + graphiQL covers all my bases nowadays.

[lovedaddy]

The latest updates from httpie have an insomnia type rest client workspace thing.

https://httpie.io/product

[piokoch]

This is some invite only software, am I missing something? I couldn't use it right away, I was asked to join waitlist.

[sbmthakur]

> I basically used it as a curl gui.

I just use Browser's Network tab for that nowadays. CORS can be a trouble at times, but that can be avoided with a few tweaks.

[dewey]

I think the killer feature for these separate tools is usually that you can easily do a right click -> "copy as curl" in the network inspector, then import it in Postman/Paw and then tweak parameters / add headers there. This is not really possible in the browser network tools.

[ironmagma]

I’ve found Hurl to be quite usable.

https://hurl.dev/

[magicalhippo]

I found SoapUI when I had to develop some SOAP services, but these days it also does REST etc just fine.

For someone like me who just does this occasionally I found it rather useful.

[1]: https://www.soapui.org

[hadrien01]

I just use the HTTP Client from IntelliJ/Rider. It's text only, you can use variables (for Auth for example), and I can copy/paste queries from Fiddler Classic/my browser or to colleagues.

[theFluke]

If you're on macOS, Auxl (https://auxl.io) is another option to try. Support for gRPC should be coming soon. Disclosure: I am the author.

[nileshtrivedi]

Try Insomnia or Hoppskotch.

[oweiler]

How is Insomnia any different? It's basically an OSS carbon copy of Postman.

[wackget]

RESTER on Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/rester/

[danuker]

> when it was a simple browser extension

You can download packages of extensions. I would recommend that you do it for the ones you love.

But the browser APIs are constantly changing, forcing you to keep running in order not to fall behind.