Hoppscotch: Open source alternative to Postman / Insomnia

> Without sounding like every other developer who hates on electron, I would really appreciate an http client with a Gui that was lighter, like iced or slint.

How much would you be willing to pay for such a client?

I'm not being facetious, I'd really rather like to know, because as an independent developer, every single time I suggest a native application using native widgets to a client, they choose the HTML interface rather than a Qt or similar based interface.

The easily doable pretty animations in CSS in a 800MB-in-RAM-while-running application is, to paying clients, preferable than a 50MB-in-RAM-while-running that doesn't have the fancy spinning, tilting, animated wizz-bangs.

I have been writing software professionally since the mid-90s; I can do you a quick GUI-based cross-platform HTTP send+receive application based on libcurl in about 2 weeks. Looking at the minimum I need to make to pay my bills, I need purchasers paying a cumulative 1000USD for this effort, so 10x buyers @ $100, or 100 buyers @ $10, and so forth.

And, of course, I'd expect to only be able to sell it for a short while, if it is popular, until a clone starts up with $40k worth of SEO and advertising money.

The software you want can be had, and the skill to make it exists, in a timeframe that is feasible, but the economics are just not there.

Bruno is nice because unlike postman all the calls are defined in files that you can add to the git of your project.

Only thing I don't like about Bruno is that you cannot generate a documentation from your api call tests.

Sounds like you're looking for https://yaak.app/.

> Without sounding like every other developer who hates on electron

Electron is hated for very good reasons. Postman in particular is just so insanely bloated and sluggish, it's painful to use on anything that doesn't have a higher end CPU.

I haven't tried it but there is Posting in a TUI: https://github.com/darrenburns/posting

uvx posting

https://posting.sh

I know it misses the sweetspot you are looking for, but have you tried curl?

Nice and kudos for your efforts.

For convincing people it never being monetized this is not enough.

You'll need

1. A copyleft license (to prevent the Redis case)

2. No CLA (to prevent unilateral relicensing)

3. A large enough and diverse enough set of contributors that makes relicensing unpractical enough for user to believe it will never happen

Nice. And the project is mature too. Don't know why I've never heard of it until now. Thank you.

Absolute GitHub.

My whole organization picked up Bruno after the whole Postman fiasco. I've found Bruno to be very unpolished and buggy. We've run into bugs where the UI will show one value, but when the request sends it uses a previously overwritten variable.

Looking forward to having to move to something else, again.. sigh

Yes, But.

It doesn't seem like the worst - yet - but Bruno also ramped up their monetization. So far it seems survivable. But given how things have gone before, it's unclear how viable Bruno will really remain.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42170934

Bruno slowly changed the policy from "we are all free" to "we are mostly free" to "pay for feature A, B, C"

Understandable, but feals like being tricked into something.

I moved to Bruno for being local, but even before being polished, I see it's taking the cloud route

The industry being who? Because this is the first time I've heard of Bruno? And what does it do that the others don't?

How does you arrive at a conclusion like this? Based on what metrics?

That extension is excellent! Been using it for few years already

it’s so good. no context switching with a different app. also, there’s a fairly compatible version for emacs with the same name.

Can you save the full request details and full response details in one click as one file with this extension?

This is the feature I use the most.

That’s incredible, amazes me that you can get a GUI like this in terminal. Next someone will put doom in the terminal

Looks cool, I will try it. How are collections stored? My use case involves programatically generating collections.

If the tool suits, I would also need to write a converter from Bruno files to it.

I've landed on the REST extension in VS Code for development and interactive work, and Hurl for more test/automation stuff. Both take a little more effort to get setup but way more productive than the typical Postman workflows I see.

I guess it really depends on your usecase.

If you're just _hacking_ a few simple calls, curl is the way to go.

But if you're working in a team, with multiple environments, with complex payloads, authentication, doing dozens of API calls everyday... Having a software able to manage libraries of endpoints, parameters, simple environment switching, included auth, sharing between team members... is a big time saver.

I personally prefer IntelliJ's HTTP Client[0] since I always have my IDE open, the files are not obfuscated in a gibberish format and can be versioned/shared through Git. But when I start working on an existing project, having a Postman collection to rely on is a huge time-saver, instead of having to go down in-existent API docs or trying to infer from the code itself.

[0]: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/http-client-in-product-c...

You may like Hurl [1]: it's an Open source cli based on curl (libcurl to be exact), to run and test HTTP requests with plain text (I'm one of the maintainers). We recently add --curl option to come back to curl. Give it a shout!

[1]: https://hurl.dev

I cannot express in words how much as an engineer I am sick of every app people suggest to me needing an entire quasi-visualized OS running behind it, written in the shittiest language ever to grace our cursed machines, just to render text and perform web requests.

This is one application where I simply prefer a GUI for most of the use cases. All the various components of an HTTP call are visually better represented as far as I am concerned. Often enough it is also specifically the payload on both sides I am specifically interested in and viewing them side by side and making quick adjustments is just my personal preferences.

In the year 2024 with 8 cores, 32gb of ram and 4tb of storage available the electron overhead generally also doesn't really matter that much to me. Though this doesn't seem to be an electron app either, rather a PWA. Which makes me wonder how well it works with all CORS limitations you are facing in the browser.

Not that I have anything against CURL either, when I am working in a CLI (for example on a server) it is the perfect tool.

I use a jupyter notebook and Python with requests.

The problem with all these tools is you pretty quickly end up basically wanting full programmability...at which point, Python is just easier and more flexible.

Combine that with uv for on-demand script dependencies and it's also completely shareable and manageable.

I'm not a fan of curl. I like the idea of "simple is better" but I don't like working with just curl. i need a bit of squish

Curl is nice but its syntax leaves a lot to be desired. It's also hard to distribute to others a "collection" of them, as you're going to end up with troubleshooting questions from less-technical users, especially when it comes to multi-request items that require pre/post response processing.

No, you are not the only professional among the amateurs/hobbyists.

I know that sounds offensive, but let's be real, nothing wrong with using AI to code or using a gui to learn about the underlying protocol. But it is what it is

The Insomnia creator has also started https://Yaak.app, which uses Tauri instead of electron iirc.

I've been using it for a while. Coming from postman it's exactly what I was looking for. Just the features I need, no bloat.

The app is called “RapidAPI” after it got bought, now apparently the team got bought by Nokia so would not buy into it too much at this point. It used to be a nice native app.

https://httpyac.github.io/guide/#feature-comparisons