Sure, if you've got muscle memory for all the flags (plus it lets you reason about all the other programs that pipe stuff to curl). I personally find myself using httpie [1] at least as much.

1: https://httpie.io/

I think curlie is the middle ground and the best (IMO) in the space. A nicer CLI for interactive use and can use and output curl flags for scripting.

As a maintainer, I feel obligated to mention Hurl [1], a tool for testing HTTP with plain text and curl. It’s a wrapper around libcurl, in a single binary, with syntactic sugar for asserts. You can use it also like curl to give you an HTTP output.

[1] https://hurl.dev

I haven’t come across Hurl before. It looks cool!

The big win with curl is the growing adoption of "copy as curl" in browser dev tools as well as "example of API call in curl" for third party API documentation.

I don't think I could move to anything else for that reason alone.

curl is amazing! I love curl. This is not meant to replace it completely. Probe just makes those most common use-cases friendlier, like looking at headers, or inspecting JSON retuned by an API with syntax highlighting, or querying without needing to reach for jq etc.

In Emacs, I found the restclient plugin quite useful. https://github.com/pashky/restclient.el

I imagine other editors have similar plugins.

Awesome! This comment made reading this thread worthwhile.