External Tools

Overview

You can quickly switch between Posting and external editors and pagers.

For example, you could edit request bodies in vim, and then browse the JSON response body in less or fx.

You can even configure a custom pager specifically for browsing JSON.

External Editors

With a multi-line text area focused, press F4 to open the file in your configured external editor.

The configured external editor can be set as editor in your config.yaml file. For example:

config.yaml

editor: vim

Alternatively, you can set the POSTING_EDITOR environment variable.

export POSTING_EDITOR=vim

If neither is set, Posting will try to use the EDITOR environment variable.

Using VSCode or Cursor

If you want to use VSCode or Cursor, you can set the POSTING_EDITOR environment variable to code -w or cursor -w respectively.

External Pagers

With a multi-line text area focused, press F3 to open the file in your configured external pager.

The configured external pager can be set as pager in your config.yaml file. For example:

config.yaml

pager: less

Alternatively, you can set the POSTING_PAGER environment variable.

export POSTING_PAGER=less

JSON Pager

You can use a custom pager for viewing JSON using the pager_json setting in your config.yaml file. For example:

config.yaml

pager_json: fx

Alternatively, you can set the POSTING_PAGER_JSON environment variable.

export POSTING_PAGER_JSON=fx

If neither is set, Posting will try to use the default pager lookup rules discussed earlier.

Exporting to curl

Added in Posting 2.4.0

Open the command palette and select export: copy as curl. This will transform the open request into a cURL command, and copy it to your clipboard.

You can optionally supply extra arguments to pass to curl by setting the curl_export_extra_args setting in your config.yaml file.

config.yaml

curl_export_extra_args: "--verbose -w %{time_total} %{http_code}"

This will be inserted directly into the command that gets copied to your clipboard, immediately after curl, producing a command like the following:

curl --verbose -w %{time_total} %{http_code} -X POST ...