Free Software I notice, which is always nice to see.
this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2026
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Why use curl when you can use netcat? I love curl but curl is not postman alternative.
Hate this elitist shit.
Just for once try to work with other humans on a tech project that requires collaboration.
Postman strike a balance between technical and user friendly.
RTFM for curl for everyone is alienating for a a lot of people.
I'm liking seeing both these opinions side by side. Both sound great.
Someone wants to spoon feed me curl commands, like thanks :-)
Someone wants to spoon me a UI which I can't curl, thanks eh :-)
Or for a more purpose built wrapper (for the same use cases as postman): https://hurl.dev/
This looks pretty fucking amazing.
i’ve been looking for a silver bullet in this space. hurl[1] seems promising as well. i feel like Bruno has always been jank, and going 1.0 didn’t help. at work i’ve stuck to vibe coding my API test code with a stack of TOML configs, that way i get to reuse/test my client code as well.
what i want is something version controllable with lightweight dependencies that i can automate easily. i’m afraid that discounts this project. not going to ask my team to download Yet Another Electron API client UI. i’m hesitant to introduce hurl, which can at least be scripted.
hey, nikolas here (part of the team of Voiden)- I am keen to understand more if you dont mind. Which of the preferences you mentioned discounts this project? the version control and lightweight?
I guess you are you referring to the tool being on Electron (Since the version control is handled through the native git integration)?
We used electron cause allows to deliver the same experience across Windows, macOS, and Linux, and makes it easier to iterate quickly in these early stages.
a few points:
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Some apps do feel heavy because of how they are structured : monolithic cores, always-on cloud layers, or unnecessary background services. Voiden is (intentionally) built with a lightweight core: offline-first, Git-native, and without extra baggage.
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Voiden uses a plugin architecture. This means that we have a small core and all the extra functionality is optional (users can enable or disable plugins) so the base app stays small while the ecosystem can grow. Community contributions or advanced features don’t inflate the core, they live in plugins that users opt into.
At the same time, there is no special tie to Electron :) We evaluated other options as well but we felt they didn’t offer the same support for all the features we wanted to deliver.
But we intentionally designed the plugin SDK to be framework-agnostic, leaving the door open to switch the core to a different framework in the future if it makes sense.The goal is a tool that stays lean, extensible, and adaptable as it evolves.
apologies for the long answer - hope it makes sense?
That's cool. I'll look into that
awesome
Postman never appealed me for these exact reasons, and I usually just use curl, but this looks like a great option.
yap, I think the plain text all the way from design, tests and docs is powerful. Looking forward to any thoughts you might have when you try.
All of that when I can just keep using emacs' restclient.