Document why this project exists

[mwgamble]

It would be great to add a note to the readme to explain why this project exists and why someone might want to choose it over HTTPie. This could also include any points where xh deliberately differs from HTTPie in behaviour/syntax.

Even if the answer is "because I felt like making it" (which is a perfectly valid reason!), I still think it would be valuable to have it written down.

[blyxxyz]

It would be good to have this in the README, yeah.

My reason for using it is its speed. HTTPie unfortunately has a long startup time, enough to be annoying. xh can be 10+ times as fast on requests to localhost, or even 50+ times if you disable coloring (which is weirdly expensive).

Other advantages over HTTPie:

• It releases as a single statically linked binary, so it's easier to install and carry around.
• It supports HTTP/2 (without a plugin).
• It has a builtin translator to curl like https://curl2httpie.online/ (Add --curl flag to print equivalent curl command #69).
• --help's output fits on your screen. (help gives longer output, like HTTPie's.)

Downsides:

• It doesn't have all of HTTPie's features.
• You can't disable HTTP/2 (Allow forcing HTTP version #68), and large downloads over HTTP/2 perform badly (Downloading is slow #49). (A solution has been merged in reqwest so we can fix the download speed after its next release.)
• It may never have anything like HTTPie's plugin system.
• General immaturity. HTTPie has seen a lot of real-world usage, that's hard to beat.
• Worse documentation. HTTPie's docs are very impressive, and you can even try out commands right on the webpage using termible. (Maybe we could do that by compiling to WebAssembly?)

Differences:

• Headers are sent and printed in lowercase (because of the libraries used).

I can't think of any (important) deliberate incompatibilities with HTTPie. There are a few edge cases it handles differently, but they should only come up rarely.

[ducaale]

One more advantage xh has over HTTPie is that it uses rustls instead of the system's installed TLS library.