why?

In the continual quest to never leave neovim, I stumbled across a plugin to make REST calls.

Like the vast majority of developers I have used Postman over the years for this task, but obviously that requires me to switch applications, and possibly (shock horror) use the mouse.

how?

plugin

The plugin repo is here: https://github.com/rest-nvim/rest.nvim

setup

This is my plugin definition for Lazy:

{
    "rest-nvim/rest.nvim",
    dependencies = { { "nvim-lua/plenary.nvim" } },
    lazy = true,
    keys = {
      { "<leader>x", "<Plug>RestNvim",
        desc = "Execute request"
      }
    },
    config = function()
      require("rest-nvim").setup({
        result_split_in_place = true
      })
    end
}

The option result_split_in_place is there to override the (somewhat odd) default of having the result replace the call window. With result_split_in_place = true the result is opened in a split to the right of the current buffer, which to me is the most obvious choice.

usage

Simply define the calls in a buffer, and, with the cursor in one of the call blocks, trigger the configured key map

# a simple GET example
GET https://reqres.in/api/users?page=5
a-header: something

# POST example
# define the body after the headers
POST https://something.com/
content-type: application/json

{
  "name": "wheelibin"
}

The call is then executed and the result is opened in a split, resulting in something like the below.