Helena is a free, open source API client for Windows, Linux and macOS, written in Go. Version 0.8.0 is now available.
What changed
The response viewer remembers your word wrap setting. Turn soft wrap on and it stays on, for the next response and after you restart the app. Previously it reset to horizontal scrolling on every launch.
QUERY is a first-class method. RFC 10008 made QUERY an official HTTP method in June 2026. It is a safe, cacheable request that carries its query in a body. QUERY now sits in the method dropdown alongside GET and POST, and the body editor works with it as usual.
OpenAPI 3.2 specs import more completely. A 3.2 document's query operations become QUERY requests. Custom methods declared under additionalOperations are imported as well, instead of being skipped.
Linux runs natively on Wayland. The UI toolkit moved to Fyne 2.8.1, so on a Wayland session Helena no longer goes through XWayland. If you build from source on Linux, you now also need libwayland-dev and libxkbcommon-dev. The same update fixes file path handling for URIs on Windows and speeds up repainting.
Security update. The Go toolchain is pinned to 1.26.7 and golang.org/x/text to v0.41.0. Together they close seven advisories that were reachable from Helena, including one in XML parsing that the WSDL and OpenAPI importers use.
Your existing collections and settings load unchanged. There is nothing to migrate.
Where to get it
Builds for all three platforms are on the GitHub releases page:
https://github.com/ideaconnect/helena/releases
Linux ships as a tar.gz, a .deb and an .rpm. Windows has amd64 and arm64 builds. macOS is arm64. Checksums and an SBOM are attached to the release.
The Microsoft Store version should be available in a day or two. Until then, the GitHub download works the same way.
If you want to try it
Download it, point it at an API you already work with, and send a request. Collections are plain YAML files on disk, so you can keep them in version control next to the code they test. Building from source is straightforward if you prefer that.
The full changelog is at https://github.com/ideaconnect/helena/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md