curl

Raised as a usability problem by 27 people on Hacker News over 17 years (2010–2026), in 18 threads.

People raised many different problems with curl, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 29 complaints

Bash escaping is nasty and terminals make editing curl commands with the mouse unreliable2026-11-03
Command line is painful to use interactively compared to other tools2026-11-03
Long bearer tokens make curl commands hard to read2025-10-21
Spending more time managing bash scripts than accomplishing goals with curl2025-10-21
Command-line interface is dated and unfriendly for new users2025-10-21
Searching a disorganized man page for a forgotten flag wastes minutes2025-02-11
Windows' curl alias behaves differently than real curl, confusing users2024-02-09
Doesn't resume or retry failed downloads out of the box; needs many manual options2023-09-04
Resume flag needs a magic special argument value, unintuitive and hard to remember2023-09-04
Curl's command-line interface feels clumsy to use2021-09-26
CLI feels clunky and its huge number of options distracts from simple use2021-05-20
Hard to find the wanted option among dozens of screens2021-05-20
Command is easy to type but a poor user interface overall2020-06-10
Users must repeatedly consult help pages to find the correct options2019-12-01
Users must look up how to do basic tasks every time2019-12-01
New users are surprised that downloads print to stdout instead of saving a file2018-01-14
Piping curl into a shell gives a worse experience than downloading and running the program2016-10-22
Inconsistent, unfriendly CLI forces constant man page lookups2016-03-03
Can't remember which flag does what, so must keep checking the docs2015-05-06
Users repeatedly must dig through docs to recall which flag does what2015-05-06
Must remember -s -S to see errors without progress bar clutter2015-05-06
Output scrolls too fast to read, and listings scroll out of terminal history2013-03-07
Hidden left menu pops open on touch and makes the page unreadable on iPhone2012-11-09
Too many command line flags make common tasks like posting with a header take ages to figure out2012-07-18
Hard-to-remember command-line flags that newcomers must learn and keep remembering2012-07-18
Hard-to-remember flags, e.g. --request to change the HTTP method2012-07-18
Its interface is unintuitive and verbose, costing users ongoing effort2012-07-18
Couldn't figure out how to download libraries with curl, so had to switch to wget2012-02-18
Its default mode prints noisy progress output to stderr, unlike traditional Unix tools2010-04-05