Show HN: Posting v1 – The modern HTTP client that lives in your terminal | Better HN

Show HN: Posting v1 – The modern HTTP client that lives in your terminal | Better HN

51 comments

Would be great to be able to use it with the hurl format to have a GUI for hurl: https://hurl.dev/docs/hurl-file.html

nsdarrenOP1y ago

I'm going to explore integration with other formats in the future. Right now there's experimental (incomplete) support for importing from OpenAPI v3. I'd like to add Postman and Insomnia collection importing too. Some kind of integration with Hurl could be very nice too, but would likely come further down the line.

pesch31y ago

Please, allow using flat file http messages. IntelliJ has a great build in http client that's using HTTP message files and otherwise has a similar feature set. But having to launch intellij every time is a real PITA.

sprobertson1y ago

This is great, I could see myself using it daily. The only hindrance I've found so far is navigating large responses. Would be cool to have some way to collapse chunks of JSON (a la https://github.com/antonmedv/fx), or even just more vim key navigation, like G/gg, %, {/}, and search.

nsdarrenOP1y ago

I agree that could be improved! The extra Vim keys you suggested should be simple enough to add.

Maybe have a look at jless, a terminal json viewer with folding support.

kbd1y ago

After never being happy with Postman or Insomnia and defaulting to 'curlie' for http requests, Posting is the first http gui that I'm actually sticking with. I have a terminal tab with it open all the time and it somehow manages to be more efficient than "up arrow+enter" (since you can just hit enter).

Thanks for improving my workflow, Darren!

nsdarrenOP1y ago

Thanks for your kind words!

yoavm1y ago

this looks really great! since insomnia started requiring an account I never really settled on anything else.

the one thing that worries me is compatibility - I echo the voices asking for hurl support. it kinda sucks that each of these programs invents its own format.

it would also be great to be able to run these requests as part of a CI pipeline, without opening the TUI. supporting a format like hurl would add this ability automatically, because the same files could be used by other clients.

p.s. upon trying it out the first things i missed is "how do I create a new collection?" and "how do I exit?". it felt that both should have been a command in the command plate. in the end if created the collection manually as a folder and exited using Ctrl+C, but I'm still not sure if that was the intended way.

nsdarrenOP1y ago

Thanks for the feedback! It is actually intended that you create the collection yourself first, but I should perhaps make that clearer.

Hiding how to quit the app was just another attempt to win over the Vim crowd!

(Yes ctrl+c is the intended way, it’s in the docs now and I’ll add it to the app footer)

timvdalen1y ago

I've switched to the built-in HTTP client in Jetbrains IDEs. The experience is a _little_ worse for one-off requests, but it's a lot nicer for things you do more often, and very easy to version control and include in a project.

halfmatthalfcat1y ago

Give Bruno a look

saila1y ago

This is awesome. Here are a couple bits of feedback:

- It took me a while to find the Metadata tab to edit a request's name, I guess because I don't think of the name and description as metadata (even if in a technical sense they are, relative to the request config). My inclination would be to make this the first tab and rename it to Info.

- I somehow managed to save two requests into the same file with no warning/confirmation from the UI.

- When using the up/down arrows to navigate between requests in a collection, I found it counterintuitive to have to hit Enter to actually select the request.

nsdarrenOP1y ago

Great feedback, thank you. I agree “Info” is probably clearer.

There are a couple of UX sharp edges to clear up for sure - a bit more validation, confirmations, etc to be added.

tusharsadhwani1y ago

This is already the best API testing client that I have found. It's lightweight, it's snappy, it's intuitive, and it can run on a VPS out of the box over an SSH connection, no proxying needed.

nsdarrenOP1y ago

Thank you very much! It's definitely not feature complete yet - but I hope it can be a solid competitor in the space.

This looks pretty cool! I have yet to find something to pull me away from the Rest Client extension for VS code. I will give this a try and see how it shakes out but at a glance on my phone I am not seeing support for variables.

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=humao.re...

Iwan-Zotow1y ago

yeah, REST vscode client is golden, just for the integration part.

Curious if it works in VSCODE terminal, did you try it?

D13Fd1y ago

Nice. Textual is awesome. I used it to develop a screenshot database app for an online game. It was ridiculously easy and the resulting app is speedy.

nsdarrenOP1y ago

Thank you!

astrodude1y ago

This looks great. I love that it's using YAML files that can be version controlled and shared.

I developed Just-API (https://github.com/kiranz/just-api) with YAMLs for automation testing of APIs.

Kudos to you man. I also had the same idea of developing a similar TUI tool because I'm getting tired of Electron apps for this. Now I can use yours with a peace of mind.

BTW, have you looked at Bruno before deciding to develop yourself?

nsdarrenOP1y ago

Thank you!

I had a look at the Bruno website for the first time a few weeks ago, although I haven't tried it for myself yet. I'm definitely inspired by and agree with a lot of the principles behind Bruno: local first, developer friendly, readable/Git-friendly collections and so on.

I think I share a lot of the same motivations as Bruno's creator - I feel the landscape of HTTP API testing clients may actually have regressed in recent years from a developer's perspective, as the companies behind Postman/Insomnia etc. figure out how to monetise them.

kbd1y ago

Textual trending to a new de-facto basis for cross-platform gui apps is a HUGE improvement from every new app being js and Electron!

Not to mention replacing heavy Java gui apps as well! The myriad DB guis for whatever historical reason have mostly been slow heavy, and paid, Java apps.

I'd actually written a thing that integrated cli db tools(eg [1]) with kitty[2] and visidata to show a query editor and then results underneath in a kitty split pane. Now I've been using Harlequin[3] in my terminal. So nice to have these apps be fast programs that live in a terminal tab instead of their own bloated poorly-keyboard-driven Electron apps.

[1] https://github.com/kbd/setup/blob/main/HOME/.config/litecli/...

[2] https://github.com/kbd/setup/blob/main/HOME/bin/kw

[3] https://github.com/tconbeer/harlequin/

erksa1y ago

This is great and feels very smooth to use. I really like the UX of it.

Great including themes, but for light mode it's only one. Does Posting/Textual support no theming falling back on the configured terminal that runs it?

nsdarrenOP1y ago

You'll be able to add custom themes pretty soon. Hopefully within the next couple of weeks.

There's no fallback to the ANSI theme of the terminal as it breaks a lot of Textual's features.

There is a PR open at the moment relating to detecting the terminal background colour I believe, so in the future we could probably use that to choose a reasonable fallback.

erksa1y ago

Great, appreciate it!

Really like it, so will try it out in my toolkit for a while! Thanks for the great work you have been doing and sharing with the community.

eigenvalue1y ago

Looks cool. Would be really nice if you could automatically generate the yaml files from an openapi.json file like the kind that are automatically generated by FastAPI.

nsdarrenOP1y ago

There's an experimental OpenAPI import function.

sibeliuss1y ago

This thing is cool. How did you do the visual terminal layout?

billowycoat1y ago

That would be Textual https://textual.textualize.io/

CodeWriter231y ago

Does it support OAuth2 authentication/ token acquisition? I’d love to not have to put my access token / secret key into Postman. Happy to be a tester.

nsdarrenOP1y ago

It doesn't support OAuth2 yet, but I do plan to add more auth schemes in the future.

CodeWriter231y ago

I’ll keep my eye on your progress. Thanks.

connordavenport1y ago

This is fantastic, I love the jump mode navigation. Will be using this for the foreseeable future. Thanks for making it.

flufluflufluffy1y ago

I’m going to use this from now on simply because of how much more fun it is xD

edit: omg I didn’t even notice the vim keybinds I’m sold

zorrn1y ago

Does anyone know which terminal emulator is used in all the examples? Looks very good!

nsdarrenOP1y ago

It’s iTerm 2

zorrn1y ago

Thanks

goalonetwo1y ago

Am I the only one that hates what the internet became?

All HTTP APIs that are all made to interact with JSON.

bartvk1y ago

Well as soon as it gets interesting, JSON goes out of the window. No firmware engineer would send me JSON over HTTP, for example.

joseangel_sc1y ago

what would you suggest?

dlvhdr1y ago

This is amazing

We've strayed so far from God

rochak1y ago

Everything looks great except for it being written in Python. I’ll work on developing something similar with Go.

timetraveller261y ago

You dropped an /s I hope

lylejantzi3rd1y ago

Am I the only one who prefers to use nodejs and fetch for this these days? Especially since I need it to work in Windows (and no, I can't install WSL).

billowycoat1y ago

If you prefer writing JavaScript, the more power you, but I suspect Posting works on Windows. Textual, the library Posting is built on top of certainly does.

4lejandrito1y ago

Then you may like https://github.com/4lejandrito/fetchbook

lylejantzi3rd1y ago

Why? It does less than what plain code can do, it's less flexible, and harder to understand. Seriously, what problem is this trying to solve?

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