The Case for Using cURL Over GUI HTTP Clients
By
imiric
Lightly toasted, lightly seasoned, mostly correct.
Summary
A strongly opinionated rant advocating for using cURL instead of modern GUI-based HTTP clients like Postman. The author argues that cURL is already installed on most systems, faster, more efficient, and doesn't require downloading large Electron-based applications just to make simple web requests. The piece criticizes the trend toward bloated software for basic command-line tasks.
Key quotes
· 4 pulledWhat the fuck happened to making HTTP requests? You used to just type curl example.com and boom, you got your goddamn response.
Now everyone's downloading 500MB Electron monstrosities that take 3 minutes to boot up just to send a fucking GET request.
You know what's better than downloading Postman? Not downloading Postman.
cURL is already installed on your machine. It's been there since forever. It works. It's fast. It doesn't need to render a fucking Chromium instance to make a web request.
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