bpacholek

Hello Hackers! I'm Bartosz, a dev from Poland. Helena is an API client I built because I wanted something Postman-shaped that is a single native binary: no Electron, no account, no telemetry, collections stored as plain YAML you can commit to git, heavily inspired by Bruno.

A few things I think are interesting technically:

* It's Go + Fyne, rendered via OpenGL. One ~35 MB self-contained binary per platform. * Collections are Open Collection YAML on disk, but auth secrets and secret env vars are externalized to a store under your config dir, so a committed collection never contains cleartext credentials. * Nine auth schemes (OAuth2 with PKCE, OAuth 1.0a, AWS SigV4, NTLM, Digest, WSSE, ...), request chaining with {{chain.alias.response.json.path}} templates, pre/post JS hooks via goja, and SSE/WebSocket support hand-rolled on the standard library. * helena run executes a whole collection headlessly with JSON or JUnit output, so the same collection doubles as a CI test suite.

Honest caveats: macOS binaries are built in CI but not yet signed (I do not have a MacBook to properly test), the secrets store is plaintext on disk for now (OS keychain integration is planned), and Fyne has its own look that isn't for everyone.

Repo: https://github.com/ideaconnect/helena - would love feedback.

Using Helena on daily basis with in my work as backend dev.

Yes, done with massive help from AI, I am a dad working 9-5 so this is mostly a pet/hobby project. Started as an investigation of where are we with GUI tools for Go.

The main component which displays requests and responses is a library itself too: https://github.com/ideaconnect/go-fyne-pretty-view

It is funny how those name often sound differently than intended in other languages while still remaining memetic. My best example is "Knorrig" as it sounds like a fun name for a pig since "knur" is a male ping in Polish.