My days of working in a shell client appear to be far behind me. These days I seem to spend most of my time in Visual Studio Code, quite possibly one of the best things Microsoft has put out in some time.

Spend a fair amount of my day working on playbooks or python scripts and more importantly interacting with APIs. A good amount has been written about tools such as Postman, which is quite good but also a bit too much for me most of the time. Sometimes you just want a quick simple way of testing something against an API, enter REST Client in Visual Studio Code.

If you go to your plugins section of VSCode and search for “Rest” you will find it and can easily install it.

Once it is installed if you form a simple request and save the file as an .http file you can then click the Send Request link above the request, or use shortcut Ctrl+Alt+R(Cmd+Alt+R for macOS).

I can’t say enough positive things about VSCode and that’s coming from someone who is purely a Mac user these days. It’s a great app with a ton of great plugins that make it incredibly powerful.