Show HN: Posting v1 – The modern HTTP client that lives in your terminal • Hacker News Board

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

#1

Post by nsdarren » Wed, Jul 10, 2024, 12:35 PM UTC

Hi HN!

I just released version 1.0 of Posting, an open source terminal application I've been working on which you might find useful if you work with, test, or develop HTTP APIs!

Posting (https://github.com/darrenburns/posting) is an HTTP client, not unlike Postman and Insomnia. However, as a TUI application, it works over SSH and enables efficient keyboard-centric workflows. Your requests are stored locally in simple readable YAML files, meaning they're easy to read and version control.

Some other features include:

- "Jump mode" navigation - Environments/variables with autocompletion - Syntax highlighting powered by tree-sitter - Vim keys support in much of the UI - Various builtin themes - A config system - "Open in $EDITOR" - A fuzzy search command palette for quickly accessing functionality.

Posting is written in Python using the Textual[1] framework, which I also help maintain.

Although 1.0 has been released, it's not yet feature complete. I'd love to hear feedback from the community to make sure I'm on the right track and learn what's important to people.

So, if you have any thoughts, feature requests, or opinions, big or small, I'd love to hear them. At this early stage, your ideas can really help shape the roadmap of the project!

Thanks, Darren

[1] Textual: https://github.com/Textualize/textual

Show HN: Posting v1 – The modern HTTP client that lives in your terminal
github.com

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

#2

Post by D13Fd » Wed, Jul 10, 2024, 1:35 PM UTC

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.

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

#3

Post by tusharsadhwani » Wed, Jul 10, 2024, 1:43 PM UTC

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.

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

#4

Post by waiyan13 » Wed, Jul 10, 2024, 2:17 PM UTC

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?

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

#5

Post by gregwebs » Wed, Jul 10, 2024, 2:24 PM UTC

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

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

#6

Post by nsdarren » Wed, Jul 10, 2024, 2:30 PM UTC

waiyan13 wrote: post #4

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?

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.

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

#7

Post by erksa » Wed, Jul 10, 2024, 2:34 PM UTC

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?

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

#8

Post by nsdarren » Wed, Jul 10, 2024, 2:46 PM UTC

gregwebs wrote: post #5

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

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.

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

#9

Post by nsdarren » Wed, Jul 10, 2024, 2:49 PM UTC

erksa wrote: post #7

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?

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.

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

#10

Post by nsdarren » Wed, Jul 10, 2024, 2:55 PM UTC

tusharsadhwani wrote: post #3

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.

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