Readwise Cli

This gives Claude command-line access to your entire Readwise library: highlights from books and articles, plus everything saved in Reader. You can search semantically across thousands of documents, triage your inbox, pull full article content as markdown, create and tag highlights programmatically, and even export your whole library. The CLI supports both products in the Readwise ecosystem, so you can build workflows that span your reading and your saved highlights. Useful if you want Claude to help you process reading backlogs, generate summaries of archived articles, or quiz you on material you've highlighted. The search is vector-based, which means it finds relevant content even when exact keywords don't match.

skills.sh installs: 601
GitHub stars: 328
last updated: Aug 21, 2026

View on GitHub

Install

$ npx -y skills add readwiseio/readwise-skills --skill readwise-cli --agent claude-code

Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.

Files

Readwise CLI

Use the readwise command to access the user's Readwise highlights and Reader documents. Readwise has two products:

Readwise — highlights from books, articles, podcasts, and more. Includes daily review and spaced repetition.
Reader — a read-later app for saving and reading articles, PDFs, EPUBs, RSS feeds, emails, tweets, and videos.

Setup

If readwise is not installed:

npm install -g @readwise/cli

If not authenticated, ask the user for their Readwise access token (they can get one at https://readwise.io/access_token), then run:

readwise login-with-token <token>

Discovering Commands

Every command supports --help for full option details:

readwise --help
readwise reader-search-documents --help
readwise readwise-list-highlights --help

Add --json to any command for machine-readable output. Use --refresh to force-refresh cached data.

Reader Commands

Searching documents

# Semantic search across all saved documents
readwise reader-search-documents --query "spaced repetition"

SKILL.md on GitHub

Details

Repository: github.com/readwiseio/readwise-skills
Category: CLI & Terminal
First seen: Jun 3, 2026