Changelog #0013 — 👁️ Browser preview, drag & drop, and more

👁️ Rendered response body

Now you can see HTML responses like a human: rendered as if you were in a browser. It’s especially helpful when you’re debugging APIs and get back rich error pages, need to get through a CAPTCHA, etc.

When we detect an HTML body, the message view switches to “Browser”. You can switch back to source view by selecting “HTML” instead.

✊🖐️ Drag & drop in the library

The streamlining of the library continues. Now you can move requests around in the most intuitive: just drag and drop a request to a collection and you’re all set.

✨ Improvements

• Collections have their own tab, where you can manage their nested requests and access other features, like the collection auth. Now, when you create a new collection, its tab opens automatically.
• You can expand and collapse collections in the library panel as you wish. But when you are working on a request saved in a collection, you’ll most likely want it expanded. Now we expand it automatically for you when you activate its tab.
• Headers are now sorted by name and capitalized. Check them out in the request preview, and the request and response views.

🪲 Fixes

• The Content-Length header was not sent in the desktop app for requests with a body. That resulted in Transfer-Encoding: chunked requests, which some servers don’t support. Fixed.
• You couldn’t send a request after removing the body file in the desktop app. Now you can.
• When you’re building a form request, you can attach files as a value, and if the file is a textual one, you can embed its contents (just like HTTPie for Terminal). The embed toggle was buggy, however, which made it hard to operate. Now it’s usable again.
• You can choose to name a request; otherwise, the URL will be used dynamically to identify it. But if you duplicated a request without a name, then the URL would be set as a non-dynamic name. We’ve fixed it.
• You can use ⌘–Enter (macOS) or Control–Enter (elsewhere) to send the request you’re working on. But when you were editing the request body, it would also enter a new line. Now it doesn’t.
• The panel resizer was overlapping the scrollbar, so you were unable to scroll in the request builder panel if it was long. Now you can.
• Booleans and nulls in JSON are now correctly syntax-highlighted again.
• There are tooltips all around to help you understand the interface. Some of them extended too long horizontally. Now they have a max-width and wrap up nicely.

Simplified usage help (#1296)

HTTPie for Terminal grew a lot in the past decade, so did the usage section in the help messages:

$ http
usage: http
    [--json] [--form] [--multipart] [--boundary BOUNDARY]
    [--raw RAW] [--compress]
    [--pretty {all,colors,format,none}] [--style STYLE]
    [--unsorted] [--sorted] [--response-charset ENCODING]
    [--response-mime MIME_TYPE]
    [--format-options FORMAT_OPTIONS] [--print WHAT]
    [--headers] [--meta] [--body] [--verbose] [--all]
    [--history-print WHAT] [--stream] [--output FILE]
    [--download] [--continue] [--quiet]
    [--session SESSION_NAME_OR_PATH |
    --session-read-only SESSION_NAME_OR_PATH]
    [--auth USER[:PASS] | TOKEN]
    [--auth-type {basic,bearer,digest,edgegrid}]
    [--ignore-netrc] [--offline]
    [--proxy PROTOCOL:PROXY_URL]
    [--follow] [--max-redirects MAX_REDIRECTS]
    [--max-headers MAX_HEADERS] [--timeout SECONDS]
    [--check-status] [--path-as-is] [--chunked]
    [--verify VERIFY] [--ssl {ssl2.3,tls1,tls1.1,tls1.2}]
    [--ciphers CIPHERS] [--cert CERT] [--cert-key CERT_KEY]
    [--ignore-stdin] [--help] [--version] [--traceback]
    [--default-scheme DEFAULT_SCHEME] [--debug]
    [METHOD] URL [REQUEST_ITEM ...]
http: error: the following arguments are required: URL

We redesigned this segment to be more simple, so it reveals what you really care about:

$ http
usage:
	http [METHOD] URL [REQUEST_ITEM ...]

error:
	the following arguments are required: URL

For more information try 'http --help'

It can also contextually highlight the usage of specific options. In the example below, it adds --pretty {all, colors, ...} to the usage since you’ve just mistyped that option:

$ http --pretty

usage:
	http [--pretty {all,colors,format,none}] [METHOD] URL [REQUEST_ITEM ...]

error:
	argument --pretty: expected one argument

For more information try 'http --help'

✨ Improvements

The httpie cli export command now applies the same prettification (coloring and auto-indenting) to the exported argument definition as it does to all other output. (#1293)