

Htty is a console application for interacting with HTTP servers. - neotyk
http://htty.github.com/

======
dedward
Two gripes.

1) If I hit Ctrl-D - it says " __* Type qui[t] to quit."

If you know what I want to do, DO IT.. don't argue with me. Why would you
write special extra code that specifically recognizes what the user wants to
do and then tell them to do it another way?

2) putting a character in [X] usually means X is the character to hit. The
help text is difficult to parse compared to what's normal....

Oh - I like the tool BTW - very handy otherwise.....

~~~
njonsson
1) Agreed, that is a bit annoying, but I thought it less annoying than losing
your entire session by quitting if you inadvertently type Ctrl-D twice to
terminate input to the ‘body-set’ command.

2) The brackets are used similarly to their meaning in EBNF to denote optional
elements. The expression ‘r[euse]’ means you can type ‘r’, ‘re’, ‘reu’, or
‘reus’ as aliases for the ‘reuse’ command.

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remi
There is also <http://github.com/cloudhead/http-console> which is based on
node.js.

~~~
njonsson
I’m a big http-console fan. It was the inspiration for my htty project.

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vog
From the site:

 _> Response codes between 500 and 599 appear flashing black on yellow to
indicate a server error_

Note that flashing stuff is one of the major sins of UI design, on websites as
well as console applications. Even on really serious errors, flashing text is
just distracting and makes the oh so important information hard to read.

I strongly recommend to remove the blinking.

Instead, you could rethink the color scheme. However, the current colors are
working quite well for me, so I guess that simply removing the flashing will
already do the trick.

~~~
njonsson
I used blinking text not so much in the “Danger, Will Robinson!” sense but
rather to suggest that the response is not idempotent. Repeating the same
request could result in a different, non-error response.

User-configurable color schemes are in the works.

~~~
vog
_> User-configurable color schemes are in the works._

That's great, but providing sensible defaults is more important than making
them configurable.

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arst
I use <http://ditchnet.org/httpclient/> for an OS X HTTP client.

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_delirium
earlier discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1667951>

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aaronbrethorst
Holy crap, yes please! I literally need an interactive HTTP client like this
RIGHT NOW. Thanks!

I've been dealing with a really hairy, picky quasi-RESTful API in Objective C,
and it can be extremely hard to differentiate between a bug in my code and a
bug in the API at times. Having an interactive console like this is going to
save me a huge amount of time and hassle. Thank you so much for writing this!

~~~
stcredzero
What about telnet? (I did not downvote you, BTW.)

~~~
aaronbrethorst
general ease of use, including highlighting, simple management of
GET/POST/PUT/DELETE, cookies, etc.

~~~
njonsson
Glad you like it. Please let me know if htty ends up causing you pain in the
course of your API work. Either tweet me @get_htty or @njonsson or enter a bug
or wish-list item at <http://github.com/htty/htty/issues>.

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wccrawford
I haven't tried it yet, but it looks like it could make some things easier. I
look forward to using it.

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NHQ
is this something one would use to play with API requests?

~~~
michaelbuckbee
Yes, it would be very useful for that as well as troubleshooting server
responses (to test for things like caching, bugs, stuff like that).

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ajx
sounds like a solution looking for a problem.

~~~
timjulien
um yeah - what's wrong with plan ole http? curl has never come up short.

~~~
njonsson
The aim of the project was to make htty an incremental advance over curl by
layering aspects of a browser UX on top of it. What you get with htty that
curl doesn't give you is primarily a session, and consequently a history. The
other features are icing on the cake.

In the near future, the difference will be more striking. The ability to parse
and build requests on various media types will make htty even better at the
tasks of both API exploration and HTML screen-scraping.

~~~
timjulien
definitely a cool project. Cool to experiment with UX on top of http. I guess
the thing that rubbed me the wrong way initially is I really like seeing
request / response. As a developer I learn alot from watching those; and
anytime I have bugs in my http it's typically a header problem, so I like
seeing those front and center.

