I find curl to be a great tool, but a poor CLI. Problem is, I'm not sure how to make a great HTTP CLI. Many have tried, but everything I've always seen leaves

I find curl to be a great tool, but a poor CLI. Problem is, I'm not sure how to make a great HTTP CLI. Many have tried, but everything I've always seen leaves me wanting. There are several complications: - URI building (things that need URL escaping) - path components - query parameters - headers - including common standard ones that should have their own command-line options - things like ETags that can benefit from storing them in xattrs - things like conditional requests and range requests (think download restart) - whether there's a body - whether it's an "HTML form" or something else - Content-Type - whether to chase redirects - trust anchors for TLS (HTTPS) - what to do with response headers - how to integrate filtering of response body vs headers (can't use stderr for either) - authentication options - cookie jars - proxies and proxy auth HTTP is such a complex beast that using it from a shell feels fraught with peril. For ease of use in a functional way, it'd be nice if, for example, one could set a header value as-is on the command-line, but also by reading from a file (or possibly a pipe, so read only once). Perhaps something like: $ VERB $base_URI [options] with options for: - appending URI local part elements - adding query parameters - adding headers - specifying where to write response headers - specifying where to write response body - if a file, maybe set [some] response headers as xattrs! - specifying request body source (default: stdin for VERBs that normally have a request body) - trust anchors - authentication Examples: $ # GET with various options: $ GET https://base-URI-here \ -a local-part-element \ -q param value -q ... \ -H header value ... $ $ # POST with file as request body source $ POST https://base-URI-here \ --file file $ # POST with HTML form specified on command-line $ POST https://base-URI-here \ --form field value --form field value ... $ $ # And so on for all HTTP methods Besides the options shown above, which are fairly obvious, it'd be nice to have: --rheaders PATH # where to put headers --xheader header # save given response header # value as an xattr -T trust_anchors.pem # or a directory, or whatever -C client_cert_and_key.pem -U username # for Basic, DIGEST, SCRAM --password-file FILE # for Basic, DIGEST, SCRAM -N ... # For Negotiate. This could # be key/value pairs that can # be used with # gss_acquire_cred_from() -J ... # Get a JWT token and use it A convention for using xattrs for storing Content-Type and ETag (and a few other things perhaps) would be very very nice.