Displaying HTTP headers for a URL on the screen is one of those things people commonly use curl for.

curl -I example.com

To help your eyes separate header names from the corresponding values, I’ve been experimenting with a change that makes the header names get shown using a bold type face and the header values to the right of the colons to use the standard font.

Sending a HEAD request to the curl site could look like this:

This seemingly small change required an unexpectedly large surgery.

Now I want to turn this into a discussion if this is good enough, if we need more customization, how to make the code act on windows and perhaps how an option to explicitly enable/disable this should be named.

If you have ideas for any of that or other things around this feature, do comment in the PR.

The feature window for the next curl release is already closed so this change will not be considered for real until curl 7.61.0 at the earliest. Due for release in July 2018. So lots of time left to really “bike shed” all the details!

Update: the PR was merged into master on May 21st.