Turns out it depends on which tool you learned first (my case and many others mentioned here). I'm not ashamed to say I've always used cURL for everything and never installed wget. wget is awesome but cURL serves me right. I do a lot of HTTP and API stuff so I only need the headers most of the time. If I want to examine the (usually) JSON output of a call, I pipe to a custom alias that combines pygments (http://pygments.org) and `python -m json.tool` to beautifully format it. (alias pretty='/usr/bin/python -m json.tool | /usr/local/bin/pygmentize -O style=monokai -f console256 -g')