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Add reader-delete-documents command #5
Description
The CLI supports the full document lifecycle — create, list, search, move, bulk edit — but there's no way to delete documents.
reader-move-documents covers archive/later/shortlist, but sometimes a save is just wrong (duplicate, broken URL, accidentally saved) and should be removed entirely rather than moved to another location.
Proposed interface:
readwise reader-delete-documents --document-ids <id1>,<id2>It's consistent with the existing --document-ids convention used by reader-move-documents. Same max 50 batch limit would make sense.
Activity
lhrnd0 commentedon Aug 11, 2026
Would love to see this, any blockers?
nahuelsoria commentedon Aug 12, 2026
One thing that might explain the silence here: this probably isn't a CLI change at all.
The
reader-*andreadwise-*commands aren't defined in this repo.registerToolsinsrc/commands.tswalks the tool list returned by the MCP server and builds each command from the tool's JSON schema, flags and all. Soreader-delete-documentswould appear in the CLI on its own the moment a delete tool is exposed server-side, and there is nothing to add here until then.The alternative would be hand-writing it against
DELETE https://readwise.io/api/v3/delete/<document_id>/, the wayloginandconfigare hand-written insrc/index.ts. That works, but it would be the onlyreader-*command not generated from the tool list, and it would drift the first time the server-side shape changes. For a destructive operation that seems like the wrong tradeoff.Happy to send the hand-written version if you'd rather have it in the CLI now, but the tool-list route looks like the right one.
lhrnd0 commentedon Aug 13, 2026
Yeah I guess the way to go is to wait for the server. Nevertheless appreciate your comment as you made me aware of the exposed API, I can workaround using that for now.