
Paw – Advanced API tool for Mac - andyfleming
https://paw.cloud/
======
flyosity
I can't believe some of the comments in this thread. Paw is an advanced
developer tool with serious functionality for testing APIs, and many of the
most upvoted comments are basically just posting links to similar tools, with
substantially less functionality, that are free.

How many of these commenters make thousands of dollars every month as
professional software engineers? How many make thousands each week? Paw is an
extremely high quality, native Mac app, made by a small team trying to provide
for their families by building software for other software engineers like all
of us. It's a paid tool but it's probably the most sophisticated API testing
tool that exists.

I've been a completely satisfied Paw user for over a year. It's been
invaluable to me and I use it constantly. It is worth the money. It is more
sophisticated with a far better user interface than anything else out there.
Use the trial, buy it if you like it, but this pattern of comments saying
Check Out Product Z, It's Like Product Y But Free (And Less Good) makes me
hate coming to HN.

~~~
cyberferret
Fair point, but I also think that a fair number of HN readers who are the
target audience for Paw are not necessarily high paid engineers and are likely
home hobbyists or students etc. who are building stuff on the side on a ramen
budget.

As someone who is trying to bootstrap a SaaS app myself that is currently
costing me a around $1000/mth, spending yet another $60 (converted to AU$) is
something to think long and hard about, especially seeing as I have been using
Postman for several versions with good results.

If someone can point out a compelling reason that Paw > Postman v2 because of
x,y and z then I am happy to consider that and perhaps splurge for a licence.
I don't think $70 is expensive for good software BTW, but I just haven't been
sold on the value of it so far.

~~~
dvcrn
I agree with this. I tried paw with the hope to replace postman (because of
chromium / electron) but just couldn't convince myself to jump ship.

Paw users, what are things that Paw can do (better) than Postman?

~~~
mittsh
As the founder of Paw, I'm certainly biased, so I'll stick to the facts. Paw
has "dynamic values" which lets you inline computed components in any field of
your request: useful for pointing to values from other requests, previous
responses (parsing is done on the fly, no need to refresh), which is useful if
you want to send back an auth token returned by a previous request. Dynamic
values can do also stuff like MD5/SHA hashes, HMAC, URL/hex/base64 encode,
timestamps, randomizers (Chance.js, JSON schema faker) with no code required
(you can write custom JS snippets too if ever needed). For example, we once
demo'ed the Algolia guys that their custom HMAC-based signature for client-
side search was doable with no code. So, if you have the need, you can do
custom stuff easily.

Also, extensions (many are built by users) are bringing lots of extra features
we would have not thought about ourselves:
[https://paw.cloud/extensions/](https://paw.cloud/extensions/)

Environment variables in Paw can be nested or computed (with "dynamic values"
described above). It can be useful, for example, to have an "Auth" variable
that contains a pointer that accesses the "user.access_token" JSON path from
inside the latest Login request, so you can later simply point to the "Auth"
variable everywhere else. One other thing about envs, is that you can have
independent groups of environments: a typical example is you have a "Server"
group with envs called "Prod", "Staging", "Local" and independently a setup
with user credentials or variables that are more like static globals (AWS
Keys, etc.)…

Now regarding to the team syncing service, "Paw for Teams". It has branches,
snapshots and full history. In a dev team, it means one dev can experiment
stuff on the schema for API v2 while others are fixing bugs on API v1, and
when API v2 is ready they can seamlessly merge the new updates back to the v1
branch. Also, we've made the choice not to be real-time synced, because it
doesn't fit well to software development: when I'm experimenting stuff with an
API I don't want others to be polluted by my temporary garbage. So instead you
"commit" changes only when ready. More about Teams here:
[https://paw.cloud/teams](https://paw.cloud/teams)

Last but not least, Paw locally encrypts with a randomly generated symmetric
passphrase all credentials you enter in your projects, that means your server
keys, access tokens, etc. are a lot safer. And now that you can (optionally)
sync with Paw's backend, we certainly don't want to have your secrets in
cleartext on our infra. As passphrases are never uploaded (obviously! but by
default stored in OS X Keychain), it's the users responsibility to safeguard
them and share them with their team (on 1Password or similar).

~~~
JohnGB
As a Paw user, I can say that I have found it extremely useful, and well worth
the cost. However, it has been a disappointment to me that (at least the last
time I asked), "dynamic values" are actually "dynamic string values" with no
integer dynamic values supported.

I find dynamic value really useful, but in most of my use, it's dynamic
integer values that I need, and so the feature is much less useful than it
could be. Could you please comment on when you plan on implementing dynamic
integer values into Paw?

Also, it appears that you have changed which versions of OS X you support, but
I had to overwrite my old version of Paw with the new one to find this out. I
strongly suggest making it clear which version of OS X the new version of Paw
requires before someone installs it.

~~~
mittsh
Thanks for the feedback, John! As you're referring to dynamic values as
integer values in JSON requests, it's clearly something we will fix. It was
planned for Paw 3, but we had to drop features to keep a reasonable timeline.
What we will be adding at the same time, is the ability to have dynamic values
that return "objects" (or lists) so in a JSON, so you can dump a subtree.

About the OS X support, we haven't changed the requirements at all for this
release. Paw is OS X 10.10+ (Yosemite+) since Paw 2.3. So maybe you had an
earlier version? If you were prompted to update with no warning, that's a bug.
Sorry about it! Will investigate…

~~~
JohnGB
No, I wasn't prompted to update without any warning. I downloaded v3 from the
Paw website, but there was nothing there listing the version requirement, so I
assumed it had not changed since the last version which I had.

Any ETA on being able to use integer values from JSON request?

------
artiscode
Software engineers are an interesting bunch... Reading all the bashing
comments about Paw not being free, I can't help but feel a vibe, that some
people expect to be paid thousands of dollars and not pay a single cent
themselves. Where does this entitlement come from?

Good job guys! You made a fantastic product. I will always favor native apps
over Electron hacks. I can't count how many times I've CMD+Tabbed to Chrome
and hit CMD+W to close a tab, only to see Postman disappear. It disrupts my
flow.

One thing though. I'm a developer, I know what I'm doing. Please make JSON
Text the _default_ option. Formatted JSON doesn't hurt or threaten me :) I
expect to see my responses exactly as they are.

Edit: Unfortunately I have to edit this comment to give additional feedback
about Paw. I'm using the 30 day trial, i.e. I am evaluating the product. Paw
is running in the background, I'm not interacting with it in any way, but it
jumps to foreground, just to show me a pop-up window informing me, that I have
29 days left of trial and should upgrade. No, thank you, I installed the app
just an hour ago. I'm aware of the 30 day trial. No need to nag about it every
20 minutes, that will not prompt me to upgrade any sooner. If anything, it
does quite the opposite.

~~~
enraged_camel
When I do development in my spare time, I tend to gravitate towards paid
software, since it tends to be higher quality and have better support.

However, my employer is extremely frugal and has very tight budgetary
controls, so getting even the smallest expenses approved can be a huge hassle.
So, perhaps ironically, I gravitate towards free products when doing
professional development.

This is probably completely backwards, but it is what it is!

Anyway, I disagree with all the Paw bashing of course, but I think it _is_
important for everyone to be aware of free alternatives - not necessarily
because people feel "entitled" to free stuff, but that their circumstances may
cause them to prefer not having to pay.

~~~
Tempest1981
I've had frugal employers before, and I've pulled out my credit card and
bought software with my own money. Just like buying my own lunch, or books.
Just seemed like the right thing to do.

~~~
cloudjacker
So you have to be lucky that

a) your colleagues will do the same so your team can use similar tools

b) you don't have to jump through hoops to install any software at all

------
josefdlange
I love using Paw. I'm no longer in the building phase of my service, but when
I was defining my API and testing endpoints, Paw was critical in the process.

My main feature request (and I'm not sure if any competitor does this, so
please inform me if it exists somewhere):

While Paw allows me to export code, which is cool and all, it would be very
interesting to allow me to compose workflows, like, say Automator in macOS,
including assertions, so that I could essentially compose and export
integration tests with Paw. It'd be neat to see some more generally API-
definition features hit Paw, or maybe a companion app that plays nicely with
Paw to do the definition half of things, compatible with Swagger and whatnot.

Clearly not a well-thought-out idea, but I think there's space in Paw's domain
for some form of what I'm talking about.

~~~
mittsh
We have actually two ideas in this area. First, as you mentioned, assertion
testing. We've recently published a workaround (as a joke, but it's actually
working :D) [https://blog.paw.cloud/posts/secret-path-to-paw-
assertions/](https://blog.paw.cloud/posts/secret-path-to-paw-assertions/) but
a real alternative is coming next.

Second, we are currently brainstorming around the idea of a good automation
app. So somehow the two ideas may merge. We're not sure yet what would make
sense for automation, but for assertions testing, for sure it's in the
pipeline!

-Micha from Paw

~~~
josefdlange
Love your interest in the community. Thanks for hearing me out!

------
jamestnz
Paw is a great tool, but I can also attest to the excellent support of the
developer. I made a mistake when uninstalling it off my old Mac, and found
myself unable to activate the serial on my new Mac. Micha replied personally,
took me at my word regard the issue I was having, and immediately added a
second seat to my serial for free, as the simplest way to guarantee I'd never
have the problem again. I appreciated that.

Secondly, there are indeed many similar tools, but I've found that Paw in
particular has well-thought-out implementations of a number of useful features
(cookies, JSON parsing, auth methods, history) as well as a neat way of
managing requests across environments e.g. dev machine vs test server vs
production API.

Paw isn't the only tool I use when testing/developing API endpoints, but I
find it to be the most featureful while also playing nice as a Mac app, with a
decent UI and the expected things like remembering my previous window
positions/states the next time I launch it.

~~~
brennebeck
Exactly. My interactions with support have all been fantastic and the app is,
for me, by far the most featureful and robust tool in this space. And they're
continually adding additional features.

------
jameslk
For those who want something that works really well, with a very nice UI and
is free, I would highly recommend Insomnia for Google Chrome (it functions as
a standalone app outside of Chrome).

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/insomnia-rest-
clie...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/insomnia-rest-
client/gmodihnfibbjdecbanmpmbmeffnmloel?hl=en-US)

~~~
andyfleming
Hadn't heard of this, but I am familiar with mashape. Their stuff is solid.

Though, it looks like it is in beta, and I don't see any way to do cloud/team
syncing.

~~~
jameslk
The latest version (3.0) appears to be in beta, but 2.x is stable and I've
been using it for at least a year. It doesn't have cloud/team syncing (at
least in 2.x), but it does allow you to export request groups as JSON which
can be shared/versioned. For being free and cross-platform, that seems good
enough for me.

~~~
gschier
Hi there. I'm the creator of insomnia and just want to say thanks for the
recommendation.

So far, 3.0 ditches the Chrome dependency and provides a much nicer UI, but
more advanced features like sync and versioning are in the works!

~ Gregory

------
eddieroger
I've used Paw for a few years since I started getting inconsistent Postman
results thanks to Chrome cookies, and I haven't looked back. It's really a
fantastic tool that is part of my daily life as an API guy. The dev, Micha, is
super helpful via email and has even incorporated feedback when the app didn't
work the way I expected (like sending request body on GET). I would honestly
buy it again if updates weren't free.

~~~
mittsh
Thanks, Eddie! That's really a kind feedback! But we're a whole team now ;)

~~~
eddieroger
Well cheers to the whole team then! Keep it up.

------
jadengore
I've owned Paw for a while, and I find it much more user-friendly than
Postman. It's not for everyone, sure, but the developer has put in good work
and you won't regret a purchase.

~~~
ceejayoz
I bought Paw because the latest version of Postman went to absolute shit.
Never looked back.

~~~
boie0025
Yeah I went hunting for a new API software for the same reason.. I wound up
purchasing Paw for my team. The big selling point for me was the ability to
define a request, and then use data from that request in other requests (the
dynamic data). And... the UI is wildly better IMO. Thanks to Paw for making a
great piece of software that's not a pain to use!

------
mightykan
Why do I need to create an account with an email and password to purchase this
if it’s not a subscription service? To add insult to injury, I have to agree
to some Terms of Service that probably indemnifies this company from doing
whatever they want with my data. Who comes up with these brilliant ideas?

The Mac App Store is absolutely horrible (lots of bugs, slow, inconsistent,
almost unusable, absurd certificate expiration issues that are completely
embarrassing for a company like Apple, etc.) and Apple has completely ignored
all developers who use it... but this is _exactly_ why I always prefer buying
from it. I don’t want some nobody developer harvesting my information, and
selling/renting it off to some who knows who either now or some years down the
line when the company folds.

Please have respect for your potential paying customers and drop these kinds
of practices. Other than recovering a potentially lost license key, there is
absolutely nothing I need from you, including any and all “news or updates”,
after I have purchased the app. Therefore you should only really need some
unique value (like the hash of an email address) for that.

~~~
brennebeck
Honest question: what apps that you purchase don't ask for your name or email?

~~~
mightykan
Asking for email, and sometimes name, is fine. Forcing me to register is
absurd. There are lots of “indy” software developers that don’t play these
games.

~~~
brennebeck
Fair point. I wasn't aware you had to register a full account to start a
trial. That definitely seems a bit much and I don't see the usefulness as
getting the user's email would be just as effective for conversion.

~~~
mittsh
While we ask to create an account at purchase time, it's never needed for
trials. Also, to work with Paw for Teams and share projects, an account is
required as it obviously needs an authentication scheme for access control…
-Micha from Paw

------
dchuk
Interesting, this is the first time I've seen a domain with the .cloud
extension. I wonder how many other companies are going to follow suit?

Regarding the app, Paw is friggin amazing. I was lucky to get it back when it
was much cheaper, but it's definitely still worth the $49 even now. The team
stuff is interesting too, as me and my guys share our exports all the time.

------
developer2
As someone who just spent 30 minutes setting Paw up for my needs, here is my
review. Unfortunately, it is not worth $50. It's not the price point itself,
it's the fact that the app is too unpolished to pay _any_ amount. After the
first 30 minutes, I won't be continuing - and would not even if it were free.

The application hijacks mouse events for custom widgets that don't function as
expected. It takes _far_ too much pointer precision to manage the request list
and the groups. Half the time the drag-and-drop glitches so that you are
highlighting rows without actually having the item with the cursor. You also
cannot drop a group to the end of the list. Similar problem in the
environments config window: add a second environment for a variable; the
column widths are too short to see the variable's value, so you try to resize
the columns and it doesn't work even though the resize icon appears on hover.

The "JSON" response format is hideous and for some reason the default. The
"JSON Text" format is what I want and switch to, but this fact is not
remembered and every single new response resets back to the ugly xml-tree-like
format.

By the way, trying to click the help icon for dynamic values opens the
documentation to a page[1] that doesn't load due to an encoded '#' symbol
(%23). Again, a sign of a final product with very little QA, being sold at a
fairly premium price for which one expects quality.

The UI and interactions are far from seamless. The constant harassment of a
popup trying to get me to upgrade is the last straw. When a user is on trial,
you don't interrupt their workflow every few minutes.

[1] [https://paw.cloud/docs/dynamic-
values/response%23Response_Bo...](https://paw.cloud/docs/dynamic-
values/response%23Response_Body_Key_Path)

~~~
fredsted
For what it's worth, I've been using this app for over a year and I haven't
been noticing the issues you're talking about. My request list probably
contains hundreds of requests from different projects grouped into folders.

I've tried using postman but it just isn't the same. Paw is much more
efficient with screen space, and I love being able to copy any request from
Chrome directly into paw and being able to tinker with it right away.

------
eliangcs
I'm the creator of HTTP Prompt ([https://github.com/eliangcs/http-
prompt](https://github.com/eliangcs/http-prompt)). HTTP Prompt is HTTPie
enhanced with autocomplete and syntax highlighting. This is the first time I
hear about Paw, and I wonder how it compares to HTTP Prompt. Would any Paw
users like to share?

~~~
colinbartlett
Wow HTTP Prompt looks amazing, thanks for posting this. I was reading through
this thread thinking Paw looks neat but I am more comfortable in a terminal.

------
jen20
Paw is a really great product, I've been using it for a long time now. I
_really_ wish they would combine this with traffic capture - similar to
Fiddler on Windows. Charles does the trick, but it's a mess to set up for
proxying HTTPS traffic.

~~~
hishnash
Traffic capture is definitely something we are looking into. Through to be
honest it would most likely be a companion app rather than directly embedded
within Paw --matthaus (@hishnash) Backend syncing dev at paw.cloud

------
ecaroth
I purchased Paw about 6 months ago and used it heavily, until recently I have
ran into multiple situations where it didn't properly include custom headers I
specified into the request, and was causing odd errors that I assumed were the
fault of the code I was testing (happened in multiple different
languages/projects). I have since started using Postman, but would love to go
back to Paw since I appreciated some if it's features (such as being able to
save an API definition into the github repo for sharing with other devs)

EDIT - didn't realize this post was for Paw 3, which just became available.
Installing now and excited to try it!

------
greggman
This is an honest question, I'm not trying to be negative but I'm really
confused.

It would seem like _best practices_ is that all of this is part of your
automated tests. Tests that are checked in to your repo and written in code
and part of your CI. How does a native app that is OSX only fit in that
scenario? Or maybe I'm not understanding it?

~~~
mittsh
As ing33k mentioned, Paw isn't an automated testing tool (at least not yet),
but rather an app where you can experiment with your or others APIs to check
if things are working, and have a visual feedback/confirmation of what you're
doing.

But that's actually a great question. We are asking ourselves the same here at
Paw: should our app offer a testing/assertions feature?

Our own server backend is in Django using the Django REST Framework (it's an
amazing tool btw) and clearly unit testing done inside the web framework is
the right thing to do. Good frameworks have mocking libraries, and unit tests
allows you to exercice all parts of the code (not only API facing). So why
testing in an app like Paw? And should we encourage "bad practices" with a new
feature that encourages users to have request/response assertions in our app
instead proper unit tests?

First, everyone isn't writing tests ;) And sometimes maybe for good reasons
(quickly putting together an MVP…). Assertions can be a quick alternative
before writing proper unit tests. But mostly, we were thinking about
assertions in Paw as a great way to do quick integration testing. For example,
we've released Paw 3 recently, pushed server updates on an hourly basis, and
we had no way to verify after a deploy that all the website's pages were up
and that API endpoints were behaving as expected. Sure, the CI was saying that
tests are passing, but who knows if someone has changed settings on AWS or on
3rd party tools (Stripe, Algolia…)? We would have loved to have assertions
ourselves…

~~~
vsl
Testing would be great. I have no use for team syncing, so won't upgrade to
the subscription version, and use Paw as dev tool when working on new APIs.
Having tests in there would be convenient and would actually make me test
things (I have a hard time making or updating unit tests, I admit). If it was
able to continuously monitor my API server side, for at least when I push a
commit, that would be great. I'm currently using Runscope for this a bit, but
it's flaky and a bit too expensive for my light use. And of course I have to
manually re-add everything I already did in (much more powerful) Paw.

------
sinzone
Paw is engineered by a top notch team in France. They care about quality and
details. We at Mashape have partnered with them in the past and they are super
responsive and always focused on the best experience for the developer.

------
hugocbp
Great news! I use Paw all the time while exploring new APIs. It is a great
piece of software.

EDIT: Wow! Just saw that the upgrade to v3 is free for v2 users! Nice
surprise!

------
throwaway745234
Bought Paw on the Mac App Store a while back. I wonder if this update will
come to me as well, or that I need to repurchase. For now I can't find Paw 3
there at all; perhaps they stopped using the MAS?

~~~
SkyMarshal
Sketch ([https://www.sketchapp.com/](https://www.sketchapp.com/)) stopped
using MAS in the past year too. Not the best trend for Apple.

------
kodisha
Best feature of paw (idk if it was intentional)

\- fetch huge json

\- collapse first level fields

\- leave node/subnode of interest open

\- change backend

\- refresh paw, and see changes way faster, coz it will show only open subtree

really useful for large json responses! (Postman dies on those)

------
ianunruh
How is this different from Postman? It seems very similar, but Postman is free
and has other really awesome features (like being able to export tests and run
them in the command line).

~~~
matthewmacleod
The main thing for me was that it's a proper native app. It works really well,
takes advantage of the native OS APIs and is a better product because of it.

~~~
doomtop
Hypernap is a proper native app and less than a tenth the cost of Paw...

[http://gethypernap.com/](http://gethypernap.com/)

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hypernap/id795069997](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hypernap/id795069997)

~~~
andyfleming
But it isn't as nice and it doesn't have any solution for cloud/team syncing,
right?

~~~
doomtop
Commenter mentioned OSX native app being the main thing for them. It is an OSX
native app.

But no, it's not a good team solution.

And I'd agree that Paw is subjectively more "nice", but I'm not sure I'd agree
it's 12x more nice...

If it were $9.99 instead of $49.99, I would have already purchased it. As it
stands, I'm sticking with Hypernap, which gets the job done for my needs.

~~~
SwellJoe
It doesn't have to be 12x better. It only has to save you $45 worth of time
more than a $5 alternative, or $50 more than a free alternative. Most
engineers are paid on the order of $30-$150/hour, depending on whether full-
time, contractor, level of experience, etc. So, it has to save about 1.5 hours
over the alternatives to be worth the price.

I don't know if it does that, as I've never used it, and don't use macOS.

There are other things it could save instead of or in addition to time:
Hassle, maybe it doesn't have any external dependencies or complicated setup;
stress, maybe it works reliably while others are buggy and unreliable; etc.

Again, I don't know. And, I tend to choose OSS solutions, even when it costs
me more time/hassle/stress. But, there's a number of reasons one might choose
a more expensive tool that does roughly the same job as lower cost
alternatives, and it might be the right economic decision to do so.

------
avitzurel
I've been using Postman for a couple of year now if I recall correctly. It's
an absolute timesaver for me when developing and using an API.

Paw looks really good. I'll definitely give that a try, especially if the team
sharing features are good.

~~~
manyxcxi
I've used Postman on and off but I just find the UI more burdensome than it's
worth and use one of the more simple rest clients and curl for when I'm really
trying to string together some complicated requests.

Paw looks gorgeous and very nicely featured. Let's see how it works on Monday
against the Niantic APIs :)

~~~
developer2
Postman is decent. But it takes too many click to do things like managing
environment variables. Then there's the double-scrolling issue when reading
responses which is atrocious; the response text is placed in a scrollable
field - and that field has the parent window which _also_ scrollable. Having
to operate nested scrollbars to read every single response - which is the most
frequent task you are performing - ruins the entire application.

I hadn't heard of Paw, but based on the screenshots and positive reviews in
the comments, I'll be giving the trial a go. Fingers crossed!

------
orliesaurus
I haven't used Paw in a while but from what I remember Paw has an excellent UI
and UX - it goes above and beyond API developer's expectation and it also used
to integrate with mashape (not sure if this is still a feature?). Either way
spectacular product!

I also got familiar with Stoplight.io - which I have found to be a little bit
harder to use but has a large array of features that I think could inspire a
lot of developers to build and grow the API dev community

aaand I don't work for either companies!

------
cwisecarver
Paw is excellent. I've used it for years. The one feature I hope for in v3 is
the ability to import cookies from Safari/Chrome/etc.

------
karlshea
I've been using Paw 2 for a project in the last couple of months and it's
totally amazing. Very excited to give the new version a try!

------
pimlottc
Looks cool! Probably should specify _Web_ API tool, though; there are plenty
of APIs that have nothing to do with HTTP.

~~~
mittsh
I'm with you on this, the wide use of the word "API" to designate Web/HTTP
APIs is wrong. But we have to admit that if you talk with someone saying
"we're build an API that does X", everyone will understand it's a web service,
not a C++ library ;) So in the end words are just ways to communicate ideas…so
we went for the simpler "API" wording. -Micha (from Paw)

------
liveify
It's not cheap but it is one of my most used dev tools that is not an
editor/IDE. Highly recommended.

------
davidhariri
I've been using Paw for two months now. Much better than Postman IMO. Best to
the developers

------
andyfleming
The big difference with Paw 3 that is allowing my team to make the switch is
team syncing.

------
harrychenca
If you already write specs for your API, you would seldom use a GUI to test
API.

------
discordance
Just a heads up to the product owner - the site needs some work for mobile
users: [https://imgur.com/a/akNqP](https://imgur.com/a/akNqP)

~~~
mittsh
Yeah, we're aware of this :( we need to spend time polishing those styles!
-Micha from Paw

------
xenadu02
I had the pleasure of emailing with Paw's creator when he was thinking of
applying to YC and introducing him to the founders of PlanGrid.

I can vouch for Paw; it's an awesome tool.

------
hkjgkjy
Looks cool :-). If there is any Emacs hackers looking for a way to make and
document api calls, I recommend Restclient-mode[0]. Emacs Rocks! Episode on
Restclient-mode[1].

[0]
[https://github.com/pashky/restclient.el](https://github.com/pashky/restclient.el)

[1] [http://emacsrocks.com/e15.html](http://emacsrocks.com/e15.html)

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aphextron
This looks amazing and desperately needed. Postman is _ok_ , but to finally
have a proper native app with a modern UI is fantastic.

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morgante
I've used Postman for a while, but I keep running into a strange issue where
it somehow shares cookies with Chrome. It's proven very annoying for testing
certain APIs (because the cookies override whichever auth headers I'm
sending), so I've been looking for an alternative.

Paw definitely looks promising. The pricing seems a little steep though.

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andyfleming
I'm having a conversation with the CEO of Postman on twitter now about ways
Postman could improve:
[https://twitter.com/andyfleming/status/759134340185862144](https://twitter.com/andyfleming/status/759134340185862144)

For now though, I'm super excited about the new Paw app.

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Walkman
It even supports SSL client certificates!

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batbomb
I was worried for a second somebody brought the Physics Analysis Workstation
back to life:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics_Analysis_Workstation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics_Analysis_Workstation)

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enahs-sf
Looks much better than the curls I am currently pasting to my teammates.

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tommynicholas
Paw is amazing

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RantyDave
I have this and it's awesome.

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KuiN
As a (somewhat stubborn) adherent to httpie | jq, what do I gain from my $50
going to Paw?

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theonemind
I'm a pretty heavy RESTful API user (feels like what I spend most of my day
doing a lot of times), a pretty heavy Paw user and pretty well versed with its
feature set, and on the CLI side, curl | jq. So I think I can actually
probably answer this pretty well.

Paw helps me compose arbitrary calls faster. It also helps me just keep track
of and search API calls really easily, just by searching the request list. I
have an API call right there, with the JSON body, and I don't have to pull up
the API docs. It's just way better than having a bunch of little shell scripts
for these API calls, and better than having a big, ugly, stupid text file full
of API calls, because I can execute them, and it really helps in composing
them.

It just helps with a lot of little random stuff. Like, if you tell it you're
doing a JSON-body form post, and you've got quote marks in there, it'll get
those quotes escaped right to get it embedded in the JSON.

If you're a heavy RESTful API user, I'd say just give it a try for a month and
see if you feel like it's worth it. I thought it was.

There's command history, and if you're executing calls multiple times in a row
and might want to see what changed between them later, the history is great.
You can scroll back in your terminal, sure, but you tend to close terminal
windows and lose the output. It just keeps everything glued together, it's
really much more coherent than trying to throw around a lot of disparate API
calls in a terminal with curl (or httpie.)

That being said, I do find it to be complementary to curl | jq. For one, the
"keypath" filter in the http exchange pane of Paw doesn't take anything close
to a full jq-like syntax. I pretty frequently use the "curl" code generator
(it's got an httpie code generator as well, but it doesn't seem that one is as
good at shell-quoting edge cases. Not sure who maintains that extension and if
it's open-source, but if you love it, you might be able to help fix it if it
interferes with your workflow) to copy out the call I composed, and even
executed in Paw, so that I can do some jq mangling. (Or i could just copy out
the json body if I didn't want to re-execute the call.)

If slinging RESTful API calls is a significant part of your day, you're almost
certainly going to find value in something like Paw. It's got a 1 month free
trial. I tried it, and didn't really plan to buy it, but a month ended, and I
was using it and liked it.

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CiPHPerCoder
EDIT: I found more info. They're using RNCryptor.

Hopefully not the C++ bindings! [https://github.com/RNCryptor/RNCryptor-
cpp/issues/2](https://github.com/RNCryptor/RNCryptor-cpp/issues/2)

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hishnash
We are using the RNCryptor Obj-C api. ( matthaus of Paw here )

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tuxracer
Would love to see built-in HAR import/export

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josefdlange
AFAIK its import/export features are plugin based. Write it!

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mittsh
That's very true :) You can write custom extensions for Paw, and they can be
then shared with the community.

But anyway, there's already a HAR importer, you can install it here as an
extension
[https://paw.cloud/extensions/HARImporter](https://paw.cloud/extensions/HARImporter)

Also, we're working on a powerful API format transformer that we will release
more officially soon, but it's already on GitHub:
[https://github.com/luckymarmot/api-flow](https://github.com/luckymarmot/api-
flow) That will allow us to release exporters for Swagger, RAML, HAR soon as
well as formats of other clients like Postman and DHC Client.

If you're curious about writing an exporter/generator though here are some
steps: [https://paw.cloud/docs/extensions/create-code-
generator](https://paw.cloud/docs/extensions/create-code-generator)

(Disclaimer, Paw guy here…)

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merb
Extension APIs mostly are a minus. It's mostly used as an excuse for not
shipping features.

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hishnash
We are making over half of the available extensions, it's a good way to ship
small features to users that need them without a full blown update. Also it
keeps the app simple for users that only need to key feature set. Check out
our GitHub: [https://github.com/luckymarmot](https://github.com/luckymarmot)
We have someone full time on the extention now, in addtion to other team
mebembers spending time as well (disclaimer member of Paw team here..)

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a-b
I'm curious if there is anything in Paw that curl or siege can't do.

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mmanfrin
This is a _UI_ for APIs, curl and siege are _CLI_ s.

You know the difference, quit trolling.

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bjoernw
Jmeter is free and has more features
[https://jmeter.apache.org/](https://jmeter.apache.org/) Though I agree it
might be overkill for simple use cases.

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bmarkovic
I understand that ISVs pick Mac because that's where most of the paying
customers are but the OSX monoculture oozing from Bay Area today is even more
tiresome than the Wintel monoculture of yesteryear.

Ask authors of Macaw what good it did them or did Web flow actually eat their
lunch.

As far as I am concerned if a dev tool isn't three platforms crossplatform it
didn't need to exist at all. Don't be surprised if it's another "yeah I
remember them" niche thing in a couple of years. Existence of Postman and
Insomnia is already a burden for this product, being OSX only will likely
limit it's eeach to Starbucks dwelling hipsters from SoCa.

