Hoppscotch desktop application | Hacker News Reader

Hoppscotch desktop application

hoppscotch.com

73 points0xedb54 comments

Although sometimes too much, I think the way fly.io starts their blog posts with a description of what they do is brilliant. I have no idea what Hoppscotch is and reading the first paragraphs I still don’t.

Seems to be a trend in hn posts. I guess people are so immersed in their work that they don’t realise others need context

OP shared a URL to a post. Context is in the comments.

HN's submissions are either a URL with a non-editorialised title, or some text (like what you get in Show HN and Ask HN posts) - not both.

> Context is in the comments.

Maybe I'm old fashioned but I'd think a blog post should have sufficient context in the intro in standalone fashion

That's fair but the blog is not an HN post.

If took me until seeing the benchmark comparisons to Postman to realize

I switched to Paw a few years back (now RapidAPI and now free), and haven’t looked back. The bloat/performance issues with Postman were too much, and I’ve really enjoyed the native experience with Paw.

Still always happy to see competition in this space because the existing tools are useful, but can still get better.

Although I have a feeling that it won’t be too many years before we forget why we ever needed these API testing tools while some API consuming LLM takes over the space.

- https://paw.cloud

I like that they are an open-source Postman, but I also dislike that they are just a copy-and-paste of Postman.

Did Hoppscotch try to be innovative in any of its features?

This is about their desktop app which is not open-source. Yes, it's an easy mistake to make because they use every trick in the book to make you think it is.

This desktop app is open source. The source right on they github page.

After determining what they do by going to the home page (postman/insomnia/bruno replacement), I saw the Google logo. Does Google seriously use such a product? These logo bars are really interesting, as everyone seems to have a different idea as to what they imply.

Google has thousands of employees right? They probably use every software product out there.

What does it do? Can't figure that out from the linked page.

I looked over the home page and even then I couldn't make sense of it. Calling something an "API client" or an "Essential Tools for API Development" is utterly useless; every piece of software is an "API client". Putting "keyboard shortcuts" as a marketing point on your home page isn't exactly helping things either.

It looks like it's another of those HTTP call generator tools, like Postman but online. I guess the target audience is people who consider "API" to mean "HTTP calls", which is why it took me so long to get it.

Looks like a decent alternative for Postman now that Postman is forcing their online sync stuff down everyone's throats.

It's an API endpoint testing app, like Postman and Insomnia

Nice. Downloaded and installed.

Clean UI (almost bordering on a rip-off of Postman.. but I guess familiarity helps users get going faster).

Lovely to see that things aren't held behind a Login button, ala Postman and Insomnia (Kong really misread the room on their latest update).

Nicely done, Hoppscotch team!

First either add "Show HN" or "AD".

Second I use bruno https://www.usebruno.com/.

"We don't talk about bruno"

I'd say Hoppscotch is aimed more at teams looking for a Postman replacement - particularly with regards to the cloud-syncing functionality.

Our team's looked into it in the past, and unfortunately we determined that the cost of having to maintain it at a sufficient SLA + the cost of potential interruption to our critical business functions if we got it wrong was not something we could absorb at the time. Easier to just pay for Postman for the peace of mind.

Edit: ah I looked into bruno a bit more. It does syncing via git which might be enticing. I'll research more.

Why do we not talk about bruno?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvWRMAU6V-c

It's an Electron app, isn't it

Built with Tauri. No electron app is a 16.5MB download.

(I have no affiliation, just a fan)

> No electron app is a 16.5MB download.

The sad thing is that it definitely could be. If you install Bitwarden (an Electron based password manager) from the Arch user repos, Electron is a separate dependency shared with other Electron applications. This means Bitwarden itself can be downloaded in just 5.4 MB (compressed, of course).

Tauri is not that different, though its dependency is the system browser rather than the Electron framework itself. I think Tauri's approach is better, but a lot of Electron applications could be only a few megabytes in size if dependency management wasn't done so badly in modern software distribution.

Unsurprisingly, the Linux AppImage is 87MB in size because it comes with a runtime. There's a smaller (17MB) .deb file, but I don't see any references to a package repository, so I guess on Debian based systems it'll just make you download the .deb every time to install it manually.

Quote from the article: "The Hoppscotch Desktop app is built on the robust Tauri framework using Rust"

Previously, the recommended desktop experience was to install the app as a PWA on your desktop.

Read the post.

If you're just looking to store API collections locally, an alternative I use is a VS Code plugin called ThunderClient [1].

imho, dev centric tools that care about system resource usage should just integrate with the IDE when possible. It's already running!

[1] https://www.thunderclient.com

> It's already running!

So is the OS.

This is the kind of snarky response I can approve of.

But it's true, more code doesn't run for free, regardless of whether some code is already running. An application is part of the OS like a VS Code plugin is part of VS Code. Emacs users know.

Seems like you have to pay for offline collection runs. I don't understand why you should have to pay for that if it isn't using their cloud to execute them.

I love hoppscotch and I'm a happy user or their PWA- not sure I understand the benefit that a framework like Tauri provides in addition? (They mention filesystem based workflows, but my understanding was that was also possible within PWA?)

Lightning-fast and lightweight sounds great! What kinds of security measures are in place for the desktop app, especially with sandboxing?

Let me guess:

- Electron

- Postman was OK until it was enshitified, so along came Insomnia which was never quite as good as original Postman and then itself became enshitifed

- This too will suffer the same fate as the previous two and will gradually also adopt a busy, unworkable, confusing UI

This is why I’ve started using Hurl because that doesn’t even have a UI. Bonus: can be kept in source control and run as part of CI/CD.

https://www.communication-generation.com/enshitification/

https://hurl.dev/

> Hoppscotch is a lightweight, web-based API development suite.

Anyone knows what template they used for their website?

It kinda looks like the default Tailwind template: https://tailwindui.com/templates/spotlight

Live preview: https://spotlight.tailwindui.com/

Not an exact match but similar-looking. It's just sort your generic "web platform" look, similar to Vercel/Next/Remix/Astro

would love to know too. The website is gorgeous.

i still use postman but as vscode extension

Nothing beats the Jetbrains IDEs’ HTTP client for this. They should release it as a standalone product.

It’s all text based so fits nicely into your repo in the native format, no exporting etc.

You might like httpyac then. It's like JetBrain's HTTP client with a lot more features.

Ive tried Jetbrains Http client in the past; but I felt comfortable with a simple UI like Insomnia

Mostly used Insomnia for a long time, until I came across Bruno. Its been a game changer for me. Requests get saved as plain text files and still provides a great UI to work with

Basically all the benefits of text based files combined with a nice UI.

Does it support environment variables that you can dynamically set, e.g. for an access token?

Yes, it does.

https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/http-response-handling-e...

Edit: I linked to the wrong doc, that one is good for hitting an auth endpoint as a first step and then using the token on subsequent requests.

For vars (including per-env vars), the documentation is here:

https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/exploring-http-syntax.ht...

Only issue I really have with it recently is that graphql requests are poorly documented and wonky as hell and you literally have to fight the ide to edit the query

Otherwise it's been pretty great.

Also I have nothing to do with intellij's company besides being a happily paying customer for many years.

There is also a similar one for VS Code: "REST Client" (an extension)

hurl.dev

That’s not bad either. One thing you get with Jetbrains which I don’t see there is the ability to use arbitrary npm packages to script pre and post response. There is some testing there but the features look fixed from the docs.

I didn't know that, thanks!

I just tried it. It feels like postman, very slow when typing json body. But it's small, and startup time is instant. I prefer bruno, but we do not talk about bruno.

It has a clean UI and can be self-hosted.

The downside is that - Only one workspace is available when offline.

- You can't point your Workspace data to a specific directory like bruno does, and manage the data like git or other clouds.

- Self-hosting login is not possible in the desktop app.

- Cannot save specific responses like postman.

- Can't create documentation for a folder/request.

Now that we've just launched, I think we have a lot to look forward to. I hope it evolves to not force cloud synchronization like postman and insomnia, and to be free to use offline.

It's amazing how powerful and clean Postman and Insomnia both felt when they were young and followed such similar trajectories into bloat and UI-unfriendliness hell.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com