Remember HTTP? The plaintext protocol? Making an HTTP request used to be as simple as echo "GET / HTTP/1.0\r\n\r\n" | nc ... . Well, it's not anymore. We fucked it up with electron applications which require subscriptions, login pages, fail to work with basic headers, have fucking cloud versions and use some ultra-smart collaboration sync.

But HTTP is still plaintext. And even though HTTP 2 and 3 are not plaintext, they are still can be expressed as one (most of the times).

So I returned the plaintext back, just wrapped the curl and called it hxxp. The most similar program to hxxp is hurl, but hxxp is much simpler and much more straightforward, with regular shell interpolation and no testing framework inside. Just write the HTTP request and execute it, that's it.

echo "GET https://example.com/ HTTP/1.1" | hxxp -

The comparison section seems to be lacking even the most cursory search for alternative API testing tools. It features insomnia but somehow fails to list postman or bruno. Tools like httpyac in particular or .http files in general are conspicuously missing. Not very informative.