There is more to it than that. It provides an expressive syntax to construct all sorts of requests. You can submit forms, upload files and set headers without having to use flags. You also get syntax highlighting, ability to pipe in request data, etc.

If you are sending complex JSON, it's probably stored in a file or it's the output of another program:

    http PUT httpbin.org/put @/data/test.json

    http -b localhost:8888/couchdb/ | http PUT httpbin.org/put

I don't really think curl is much harder, e.g.

curl -X PUT -d @data/test.json httpbin.org/put

It also has the advantage that it supports all the options you might ever need, for example http authentication and proxies are often useful.

It has the disadvantage that it's not at all obvious what it does unless I open up the man page.

HTTPie also supports proxies and HTTP auth (see --proxy and -a/--auth).

Doesn't support socks 4/5 proxies. :)

Requests and urllib3 have a long way to go to be complete competitors with cURL.

P.S. Good job nonetheless. Seems like a good idea to make a specialized HTTP CLI client for JSON/RESTful services.

Why not use JSON syntax for JSON instead of introducing your own, though?

You can still use regular JSON syntax, if you like:

    echo '{"foo": "bar"}' | http url

The reason for having the simplified one is that it's less verbose and usually doesn't even require you to quote it:

    http url foo=bar

Yeah, most of us would forget to single quote the JSON. It is definitely more verbose too - I agree with the command-line compatible simplification.

I think the tool looks useful. I'd appreciate something like this for manually poking web servers when conducting a security assessment.

[Edit: removed HN snarky comment]