IDE Power In HTTP Testing

There are a lot of great options on the market like Postman, Insomnia, SoapUI, or Yaak. So why am I working on yet another entry to a growing and crowded market?

In a profesional capacity I've always used Postman, it was the defacto standard on teams I worked on and was always easy to get up and running in a new project when someone would share a link or send a JSON blob for you to import all the relevant requests. It never felt the snappiest or had a notably amazing UX, but it never got in the way either.

Unforunately one day Postman had an outage, during the exact moment I needed to triage a production issue with an obscure and publicly undocumented third party API. I was greeted with a never ending loading spinner and had to resort to digging through the codebase and production envrionment variables to find the specific combination of access keys and endpoints I needed at that moment, things which usually lived in my API testing client without issue!

This was the impotice for me to begin work on my own offline-first client, which came with the opportunity to address some pain points I had but tolerated. These included the inability to display two requets side by side, ever increasing application bloat, a search bar which sometimes worked but most often showed me other peoples collections who accidentally made them public, and popups asking me to try the latest cool new AI. And finally I wanted a more IDE like experience, and to bring the hotkeys and powerful navigation I am accustomed to in my IDE to my API testing client.