
Postwoman – a free alternative to Postman - michaelsbradley
https://github.com/liyasthomas/postwoman
======
jawns
I'm curious about whether the product name "Postwoman" violates Postman's
trademark and whether Postwoman will be getting a C&D letter soon, demanding
that the name be changed.

Normally companies don't get to claim broad trademark protection for prefixes
-- Facebook has been shut down when trying to broadly enforce its trademark
against anything prefixed with "Face" \-- but "Postwoman" is close enough and
is marketed as a competing product in the same place.

Update: It seems the author is also worried about this. On her blog post
announcing the service, someone raised the concern, and she acknowledged that
it's a problem:
[https://dev.to/liyasthomas/comment/ee8m](https://dev.to/liyasthomas/comment/ee8m)

~~~
perspective1
IANAL but the basic sniff test is could "Postwoman" be confused with
"Postman?" I think the answer is yes. With the author calling it an
alternative to "Postman," you have the author acknowledging Postman is a
strong trademark. And it's not like it's the only one available fitting the
"{HTTP-METHOD}{MAN|WOMAN}" construct-- you could rename it "HeadWoman" and
probably be okay.

~~~
jedieaston
And I don’t think GETwoman or PUTWoman would be good either, as there’s other
apps for that.

------
ArchReaper
Anyone know how this compares to Insomnia/Postman?

Ever since Postman started getting worse I switched to Insomnia and haven't
looked back.

~~~
toomuchtodo
How does Insomnia compare to Paw [1]?

[1] [https://paw.cloud/](https://paw.cloud/)

~~~
gschier
Hi! Creator of Insomnia here :)

The main differences are that Paw is a native Mac app, paid, and closed
source.

Insomnia is open source, cross-platform, and free to use (although there is a
paid plan).

Some of Insomnia's biggest differentiators are it's GraphQL query editor
(autocomplete, linting, etc) and it's ability to be customized via plugins and
themes.

~~~
rjbrock
GraphQL is the reason I just switched from a paid Paw license to insomnia!

------
kamfc
"Politically Correct" penetrates software -- Support at your own peril -- you
may be the next victim.

~~~
K2L8M11N2
How does one eyeroll in text? Asking for a friend...

------
thrownaway954
How does this compare to insomnia.

[https://github.com/getinsomnia/insomnia](https://github.com/getinsomnia/insomnia)

~~~
gschier
It looks like Postwoman is is more of a simple utility right now. Perhaps it
will grow to something more full-featured in the future but that seems to be
the main differentiator right now. Insomnia, for example, supports environment
variables, a GraphQL IDE, plugins, and many different authentication formats.

As the creator of Insomnia, I love seeing new projects like this and am really
excited to see what Postwoman grows into. It looks awesome, is open source,
and there's always room for more developer tools! :)

------
detaro
Original Show HN by the creator 3 months ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20817627](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20817627)

~~~
liyasthomas
Author here: yep, that was me.

------
nickjj
Nice timing.

If anyone is interested in how Postwoman was developed and deployed, the
author of the project did a huge write up of her tech stack today.

That's at: [https://runninginproduction.com/interviews/5-postwoman-
is-a-...](https://runninginproduction.com/interviews/5-postwoman-is-a-free-
fast-and-beautiful-alternative-to-postman)

~~~
liyasthomas
Yes!! Author here. Please go through this.

------
paedubucher
I always wonder why some many developers work with Postman (or Postwoman), and
so without any automation whatsoever. Example: Requesting some JSON payload
and extracting some generated id from it looks like a clumsy point-and-click
adventure. With curl, you can use any appropriate program to extract output,
say jq:

    
    
        curl acme.org/my/resource | jq -r '.id'
    

I see how some project manager doing a presentation of a bleeding-edge feature
might profit from Postman, but as a developer?

~~~
yahyaheee
Yea devs that use postman crack me up, in my experience you usually just
aren’t writing tests

~~~
paedubucher
Exploring an API?

------
calibas
Maybe I'm missing it, but I'm not seeing the full response headers, just
"cache-control" and "content-type". Being able to see the full response
headers would make this a much more useful tool for debugging APIs.

~~~
liyasthomas
Would you like to report the issue faced on GitHub so that we could track and
rectify them really quick.

------
telekid
If Postwoman doesn't tickle your fancy, I'd take a look at
[https://github.com/pashky/restclient.el](https://github.com/pashky/restclient.el).
(I believe there's a vim equivalent, too.) You can save requests in a simple
.http file, and check them into your codebase. Makes collaboration very
simple.

------
Insanity
Postman is so horrendously slow when using a quite large "team space". I
should really explore the alternatives

------
faissaloo
I'm all for anything killing Electron

~~~
bob1122
Same, however this similarly is also a Chromium / JS mishmash

~~~
faissaloo
Small steps

------
codesternews
The author is Male. I am not sure just to get attention he brings gender issue
in non gender name.

Also it should be good idea to get some other name. The product itself is
good.

I am sad to see you get lot of attention because of gender instead of your
actual work.

------
liyasthomas
Author here: Ask me anything! Shoot me any doubts, asks and I'll rectify them.

------
lilyball
I'm encouraged by the GraphQL support with docs, except there appears to be no
way to provide headers (such as Authorization), which means I can't even fetch
my schema.

~~~
liyasthomas
Author here: GraphQL support is just landed on PW. Expect all functionalities
in a month. Follow the project on GitHub.

------
bort-simpson
I don't see a feature where you can create tests for responses which is a very
important feature for me that exists in Postman

------
kanox
So I guess commit messages support emojis now.

I've seen this before, but not quite so consistently.

------
mfontani
Posthuman was taken?

~~~
frabbit
Author should take advantage of this suggestion. It's awesome and side-steps
the noise around the current name.

------
m3kw9
What’s the difference between this name and postman2?

------
thecleaner
It should cost 80percent of postman technically.

~~~
forgot-my-pw
What should a free version be? PostSlave?

------
ukyrgf
Does anybody else take a project a _lot_ less seriously when all of their
documentation and commit messages are plastered with emojis? I feel like I
can't create a cohesive narrative in my mind when every sentence ends with a
unicorn or a rainbow or a volcano.

~~~
luketheobscure
When emoji use follows a strict convention (something like
[https://gitmoji.carloscuesta.me/](https://gitmoji.carloscuesta.me/)), it can
make it easier to scan a list of commits and get a rough idea of where the
development focus is (i.e., hardening vs. feature development).

~~~
aylmao
I've seen this convention before. I personally find it more useful to tag
commit messages with [fix], [docs], etc. It makes it more easily searchable,
which is IMO what you really want. You can:

    
    
        git log --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit | grep "\[doc"
    

to see documentation commits, and count them by piping to `wc`.

Emojis feel... complicated. What do they mean? Here you're just typing the
literal word so not much to remember or search.

~~~
wehrkeoruw
You can't search by arbitrary Unicode characters?

~~~
cbsks
It isn't unicode. I cloned the repo, this is the commit message in the command
line:

    
    
      :rotating_light: Lint
    

Here's the same commit in GitHub:
[https://github.com/liyasthomas/postwoman/commit/4c9c9a224061...](https://github.com/liyasthomas/postwoman/commit/4c9c9a22406141f0b63f4f13b6b7e589dd8f74bb)

Why not just use "[rotating_light] Lint" as the commit message? Or even
better: "[lint] Make changes recommended by foo lint\n\nThis is the foo
command used: ..."

------
Koshkin
Why does the word ‘woman’ look like a derivative of the word ‘man’? I think
it’s unfair! (The term ‘female’ is no big help, either.)

~~~
mitchty
Because it isn't a derivative of it.

Have a listen to this podcast by a linguist:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607712](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607712)

The short answer is the modern word woman has a separate etymological root
than the word man. And the word man has had linguistic changes recently that
mask those origins. Woman as well actually.

Man originally meant human really, and woman used to be Wifman (somewhat
literally female human). Wife is a holdover from this prior to Middle english
usage of the term.

Old english used wer and wif as man/woman respectively, and as you can guess
Werewolf derives from the old ussage of man.

In short, its complicated and woman isn't a derivative of man. Its much more
interesting than that. You can't look at the modern spelling of words to
derive much on how we got to this point. You'll make a ton of categorical
errors that way, especially in English given man used to just be the human
race. Our modern take of man anywhere as needing to be replaced with woman
depending on gender is slightly amusing once you know the etymology of the
term in that regard.

~~~
jamie_ca
The big rant I keep seeing around the internet is
[https://i.imgur.com/6g45AxX.png](https://i.imgur.com/6g45AxX.png)

