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Just Use Curl

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Re: Just Use Curl

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I agree, and have no qualms with people who prefer GUIs. But to say that "majority of users (developers?)" prefer GUIs seems outlandish at best.

Many developers are on Windows, and those tend to prefer GUIs. CLI reliance is mostly a macOS/Linux thing.

I know some window developers use use WSL for all of their devving, and they are obviously gonna be working through the terminal.

Re: Just Use Curl

#122
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeeeep. My response to this article is the same one I have to anyone out here screaming "it's so easy to just do it my way!": if it's so easy, then do it for me! The ffmpeg fans are the loudest screechers I've found, in this area. They'll point to the trainwreck of a UX that is Handbrake as an example of GUI for terminal commands. And, look - command line utilities are great and Handbrake is a super good product that…

What's supposedly wrong with Handbrake UX? To me it seems like the complexity is just irreducible. There's so many formats, so many bits and pieces that can go in a video stream, they're not very visualizable, and they have surprising edge case interactions. Not to mention there's a lot of "normally the program figures this out for you, but there's an option to override it if broken" knobs and dials.

In my experience, handbrake doesn't expose every option from ffmpeg and is more focused on transcoding. One nitpick I have with handbrake is that it doesn't support VAAPI encoding nor Vulkan Video Encoding for AMD cards on Linux.

Re: Just Use Curl

#123

I might get lit on fire for this, but I don't find manpages very easy to use. If want to quickly remember an option or argument order, I am met with a wall of text. Does anyone have tips for how to make it more useful? Maybe I could grep better for options? For example in the link, the author lists out common curl commands like making a POST request or adding a header. If you tried to look through the manpage for thi…

I often find it easier to read man pages in the browser. Use `man --html=`.

Re: Just Use Curl

#124
The author could benefit from some research into user centered design. CLI is notorious for poor discoverability and consistency, two halmarks of GUI (at least 20 years ago; these days less focus is put on these elements). Humans are very not good at remembering command line flags but great at looking at then manipulating a screen that shows fields for all the flags.

Re: Just Use Curl

#125
post #6

> It's already on your machine, dipshit Does anyone actually enjoy this uhm style of writing?

What a weird place to try and raise moral panic. Do you ask people "Do you actually enjoy talking like that?" every time you hear a curse word?

> What a weird place to try and raise moral panic.

Sigh. No moral panic involved and I don’t care if people swear. I asked about the style for a reason.

It’s a bit like if someone makes technical posts written in archaic English or in pirate speak. They’re free to do so of course but it’s still a weird choice given context

Re: Just Use Curl

#126

The author could benefit from some research into user centered design. CLI is notorious for poor discoverability and consistency, two halmarks of GUI (at least 20 years ago; these days less focus is put on these elements). Humans are very not good at remembering command line flags but great at looking at then manipulating a screen that shows fields for all the flags.

[deleted]

Re: Just Use Curl

#127
post #9

There's also hurl: https://hurl.dev You define all your requests in a plaintext format and can inject variables etc... plus the name is kinda funny.

Emacs had something like this long ago (of course it did). https://github.com/pashky/restclient.el I also like httpie but they seem to have gone commercial.

I use emacs restclient all the time. I have requests saved in my orgmode notes that I can run with a simple C-c C-c. It's great.

Re: Just Use Curl

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything you can do in a terminal can be done with what I suggested because what I suggested was literally using buttons to write a terminal command.

Not really. In a terminal the whole input can be dynamic with variables, pipe and executors like find’s exec, xargs and parallels. That’s pretty much the whole point of a shell and CLI interaction.

yes, really. If you think what I'm describing cannot enter text into a cli, you are thinking about what I am describing wrong. There's nothing you can put onto a command line with a keyboard that cannot be put there by an app using string manipulation. You're welcome to try to describe something, though.

Re: Just Use Curl

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have dozens of collections with hundreds of requests, most sending complex payloads, all perfectly organised hierarchically. I'd rather use a collapsible UI for that, if you prefer to have hundreds of scripts in folders that's fine too. Actually I don't even create those collections, we have OpenAPI/Swagger docs for all of our APIs and I just import them with a couple of clicks (which I'm sure there's a way to do w…

> I'd rather use a collapsible UI for that, if you prefer to have hundreds of scripts in folders that's fine too. No, I don't (what a shitty strawman), I create abstractions then, like any other project. Surely you don't have hundreds of completely original and bespoke requests? Previously I've handled thousands of requests by having a .csv to load from.

> Surely you don't have hundreds of completely original and bespoke requests?

Absolutely I do. It’s not like a few hundred endpoints is out of the ordinary in any mid sized company.

I can go an edit any of the requests with autoformatting, highlighting and whatnot.

As I say, you can keep your csv and abstractions, not trying to convince you that you should switch from whatever works for you.

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