I have been using curl for command line http stuff for years and years. I tried out HTTPie a few months ago for testing a json-flavoured API and I found it is amazing, it is so much less awkward than piping curl into jq and struggling with curl’s POST body options

I'm in the same boat. Every time I have had to use curl over the past ~15 years I've had to look up how to do the few basic things I need to do. With HTTPie, its easy enough that I haven't needed to look anything up after the first two or three times.

Sure, cURL can do it and if I used it frequently enough, I guess I'd remember how to use it without having to look it up every time, but for my basic and infrequent use, HTTPie is more pleasant to me and I can remember how to use it.

I'm not particularly good at memorising shell commands, but curl always felt straightforward. I use it for all kind of requests and rarely need to look up the parameters.

Which curl body options are you talking about? I just see -d for the data, -XPOST which is optional when using -d, and --data-binary mostly for file transfer

I keep using httpie for all testing and manual stuff, because with cURL (or wget) I have to continuously call up the help pages to find the correct options. In httpie it seems the philosphy is that you mostly use various non-option strings for these common additions (headers and query parameters) and I can remember these more easily :)