deleting chat history in the CLI

[slimeopus]

What would you like to be added?

the command to delete the list of chats in the CLI

Why is this needed?

to avoid accumulating unnecessary chats

Additional context

No response

[pomelo-nwu]

Hi @slimeopus , thanks for opening this issue!

We understand the desire to clean up accumulated chat history. After consideration, we'd like to explain our thinking and propose an alternative approach.

The Tradeoff

This presents a tradeoff between convenience and control:

Aspect	Auto-save (current)	Delete Command
Ease of use	✅ Zero config	⚠️ Learn commands
Flexibility	⚠️ All or nothing	✅ Precise control
Design consistency	✅ Fully automated	⚠️ Mixed paradigm

Our Position

We prefer not adding a built-in delete command, as it would contradict the "automatic by default" philosophy that motivated our auto-save redesign. The goal was to remove the need for manual chat management entirely.

Alternative: Ask Qwen Code

Instead, you can ask Qwen Code directly to manage your chat history. Chat records are stored in:

~/.qwen/projects/<project-name>/chats/

You can use natural language prompts like:

"Delete chat records in ~/.qwen/projects/ older than 1 week"
"Show me my chat history and help me clean up old sessions"
"Find and remove large chat files to free up space"

This approach is more flexible — you can specify any condition (by date, project, size, keywords, etc.) without being limited by hardcoded command flags.

Next Steps

We'll improve documentation to make the chat storage location more discoverable. Would this approach work for your use case?

[slimeopus]

Thank you, do as you see fit.

[machinetown44]

What shall one do when the conversation is broken by a faulty tool call mid-implementation then? No, ctrl+Y doen't work, the api returns an error. Right now I just have to revert to manually editing the conversation json, but it would be nice to have a built-in way to remove the last few messages.

[yttriumz]

When I asked to remove history, it tries to remove the workspace files it modified and created. Normally people don't want this. Please provide choices: if you want the model to manage history, it's fine; if you want to manage the history manually, it should be OK as well.