Best alternatives to xh in 2026

curl is powerful but its flag-heavy syntax is unfriendly to read or remember, while HTTPie fixed that with a more human syntax but runs on Python, which means slower startup and a runtime dependency to manage. xh takes HTTPie's friendly command syntax and reimplements it in Rust as a single, dependency-free binary, so you get readable commands like `xh get example.com` with near-instant startup and no interpreter to install. xh supports HTTP/2, authentication methods (basic, bearer, digest), session management for repeated requests, a `--curl` flag that translates a request into an equivalent curl command, download resumption and Unix socket support. It ships as prebuilt binaries for Linux, macOS and Windows. It's free and open source with over 8,000 GitHub stars, active maintenance (1,856+ commits), though it hasn't yet implemented every HTTPie feature and has no plugin system.