I think both of you are right, just talking about slightly different layers of the problem.

curl absolutely works (and it rocks!). Shell scripts absolutely work. For terminal-native teams, that can be a great setup.

But this feels a bit like two very old debates mashed together: terminal/Vim vs Git GUI, and Emacs vs IDEs. Yes, some people are perfectly happy doing everything from primitives - git in the terminal (i hope by the majority), editing in Vim, wiring things together with scripts, maybe extending Emacs until it becomes a small civilization :D. That is a real workflow, and for the people who like it, often a very effective one.

But the existence of that lower-level workflow does not make higher-level tooling pointless. It just means different people and teams want different layers of abstraction on top of the same underlying capability.

So I do not think the real question is “can curl do it?” it can, for sure!. The real question is whether raw requests plus scripts are the best shared working model once API work starts involving reuse, documentation, onboarding, review, collaboration, and people outside the terminal-native crowd. For some teams, yes. For many teams, not really.

That is where something like Voiden, starts to make sense to me. Not as a replacement for curl (at the end they are all making a simple API request), but as a way to make API work more modular, composable, and shareable without everything turning into a pile of scripts, copied commands, and scattered docs.

But the bigger problem i see is when simple tooling (or rather what should be simple) become super bloated - and are super opinionated and take away the flexibility from users - and they end up having to design their workflows around how a tool works. Voiden i guess is taking the less opinionated stance - and trying to give all the freedom - with markdown, offline and programmable interfaces etc etc… but let’s see.

As much as I loved firefox in the early days - i find it so slow compared to just about all the chrominum based offshoots ive tried. And UX wise - its just confusing to see things change constantly.

super nice! Not something I can attempt but its great to see how you did it!

The one of the most important features - I see thats not mentioned by the author of the post here - even though it should be super highlighted - Voiden is the first client where the entire api request is deconstructed into reusable blocks.

Headers, Query Params, Path Params, Body (JSON, Form params etc)…

and reuse them in different apis to have ALL common elements done in one file and then change them once and it will all get updated in all the other docs (just like in code - when we add a extra logic to an imported method). thats super super convenient and saves so much time compared to all the other tools out there - where you mainly duplicate stuff or just use environment variables to substitute.

OH and the pre and post request scripts - with the support for different languages like JS, python etc … its amazing… first API client i use where you can write pre and post api requests in a different language than JS (as a non JS developer this is huge)!

It’s 2026, and we’re still essentially filling in the same request forms from almost two decades ago. Headers table. Params table. Body tab. Raw/JSON toggle. Postman’s surrounding ecosystem grew. The pricing model evolved. The cloud story expanded. But the core interaction model barely changed.

For a company that once redefined API tooling, I feel they dropped the ball in innovating the hell out when they had the chance. Now they are burdened by their own success - cant move and cant adapt. Only squeeze people for more.

And maybe the bigger impact, sadly of Postman, is what happened to the ecosystem. Because Postman defined the category so strongly, most competitors copied it. For years, innovation in API tooling meant “Postman, but open-source” or “Postman, but git-based.” The dominant UX pattern became the ceiling. Everyone optimized to replace it - few tried to rethink it.

And I think thats where I see tools like Voiden as a breath of fresh air - a modern take, composable blocks, programmable interfaces. I love it. I dont want to be clicking 100 buttons to figure out whats in my api “tab”. :D

quite cool - i think voiden is similar in premise to verb - but it is more easier to manage for non emacs folks. But i’ll check it out - emcas will bring back the ptsd from my phd days of writing my thesis on it :D