In my day-to-day work as a security engineer, I kept running into the same friction: after exporting a HAR file from the browser, I often need to inspect it immediately, usually while debugging a user flow or building a bot automation script. Opening a massive JSON blob in a GUI viewer slows everything down.

It’s even more noticeable during screen shares. I’d rather share a single terminal window than bounce between different apps and panes.

So I ended up stumbling across an unfinished project called harview (https://github.com/sheepla/harview), and took it as the perfect excuse to dive into a bit of “vibe coding” and create a tool i can use daily. The result is harview, a lightweight HAR viewer for the terminal, written in Rust.

If this sounds useful and you give it a spin: https://github.com/armsultan/harview

What it does (today)

The goal is simple: browse HAR files comfortably in a terminal UI.

A few things I’m happy with so far:

• Built using ratatui, a pleasant and responsive TUIs in Rust.
• Split-pane interface: requests list on top, details below
• Tab navigation: jump between Headers, Cookies, Request body, Response body
• Pretty printing for JSON and markup so it’s readable instead of raw
• Syntax highlighting toggle (and it automatically avoids highlighting very large bodies to keep things snappy)
• Base64 decoding when HAR content is encoded
• Mouse support (scrolling, clickable tabs, clickable rows), because sometimes it’s just easier

Integration with my favourite tools - I also added a few integrations so you can pop content out into tools that are better for deep inspection:

• fx for exploring JSON
• bat for nicer viewing with syntax highlighting
• Open in your favorite text editor - $EDITOR for “just let me edit/search this properly”

These are optional, but they make the workflow feel more like a practical utility.

Installing / trying it

Right now the simplest path is from source:

git clone https://github.com/armsultan/harview.git
cd harview
cargo install --path .

Then:

harview path/to/file.har