Insomnia, an API development/debugging/testing tool, has been thoroughly enshittified. It now requires a cloud account to use, even though most of the use is just sending requests from your local machine (to servers often running on localhost too).
Luckily it was OSS so we have a new fork without the cloud “features”: Insomnium
Nice! Insomnia was getting shittier in every update. Both insomnium and bruno looks good. Thanks 🙏
Glad I’m not the only one who noticed this. I switched from Postman because all I wanted, damnit, was to paste a cURL command as a template and go from there.
I know this isn’t a rare request, because back when I started, it was one of three advertised features, and there were official Insomnia video guides on it.
For years, every goddamn update made it harder and harder. It’s now completely unintuitive to do, if you don’t know how it’s done.
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An electrone app for REST testing? Like running a freight train to move around a couch.
Valid criticism. I would be down for e.g a QT based alternative, but I’m not aware of any :/
Great to hear, i didn’t know Insomnia also went the way of forcing cloud integration (which is also a huge security issues with the usage of credentials etc.) along with Postman. Our company actually suggested Insomnia as an alternative to Postman upon banning the latter, but they might revise that recommendation to Insomnium now.
Insomnium is also the name of a great melodic death metal band by the way: https://www.metal-archives.com/bands/Insomnium/2332
What’s with the enshittification of all those API testing tools? Can’t we just have a nice GUI for cURL that doesn’t feel the need to reinvent the wheel and make money?
I actually thought Insomnia itself was too horribly slow, so I used windows only, closed source freeware nightingale for a while, and nowadays just completely stopped using these tools and switched to JetBrains HTTP-Client, pros are plain text and integrated if you use their IDEs anyway, but obviously neither free nor libre.
I might check out Bruno for a GUI tool, though.
Hadn’t heard of Bruno, looks nice too!
Yeah, found it in the HN comments when yet another closed source VC-funded REST tool was posted :D
First, thank you for the great fork, its always good to see true open-source forks of things. But…
I’m confused. I’ve been using Insomnia for ages everyday and I’m on the latest version is there’s no login:
Only those buttons there, but I haven’t seen any popup or attempt to make me login. Can anyone elaborate on this?
8.2.0? Don’t upgrade if you aren’t there yet!
Oh yeah, I just upgraded to Insomnium. Just a PSA: if you’re on Insomnia export your data BEFORE installing Insomnium as it will obliterate your Insomnia installation and you’re going to lose your collections if you haven’t exported it before.
The vote for the project logo is still open! https://github.com/ArchGPT/insomnium/discussions/11
All of those icons are too complicated.
An alternative: https://www.usebruno.com/
Thank for sharing that. I’m going to try it. :)
I do like HoppScotch. Is there a reason why you may prefer Insomnia?
I prefer a desktop app
How does Insomnia/Insomium compare to dot-http ? It looks like a nice UI wrapped around CURL. A Postman alternative.
