remarkable-expert_skill

Overview

This skill is a reMarkable tablet expert that helps list, download, and upload files using rmapi. It documents common commands, file format behavior, and practical workflows for handling PDFs, native notebooks, and markdown-to-PDF uploads. Use it when you need reliable, repeatable steps to manage content on a reMarkable device.

How this skill works

The skill relies on the command-line tool rmapi installed at ~/.local/bin/rmapi and assumes it is authenticated. It explains how rmapi lists folders, downloads .rmdoc archives, extracts embedded PDFs, uploads files, and creates folders. For markdown uploads it uses pandoc to convert to PDF before calling rmapi put.

When to use it

• List files and folders on your reMarkable tablet (rmapi ls).
• Download a document to view or extract the embedded PDF from a .rmdoc archive.
• Upload PDFs or converted markdown to the tablet (rmapi put).
• Create folders on the device or check exact remote paths (rmapi mkdir, rmapi ls).
• Troubleshoot common errors like authorization or missing files.

Best practices

• Ensure rmapi is installed at ~/.local/bin/rmapi and re-authenticated before use.
• Convert markdown to PDF with pandoc locally, then upload the PDF rather than trying to upload raw markdown.
• When downloading, inspect the .rmdoc zip and extract the .pdf file to view locally.
• Use rmapi ls to confirm exact path and name to avoid file-not-found errors.
• Keep uploads under cloud size limits (commonly <100MB) and check network/authorization issues first.

Example use cases

• Download a purchased PDF from Books, extract the PDF, and open it on your laptop.
• Convert a project README.md to PDF with pandoc and upload it to Documents/ for reading on the tablet.
• List a folder’s contents to find the exact remote filename before running rmapi get or put.
• Create a new folder on the tablet for a course, then upload lecture PDFs into that folder.
• Recover a PDF when rmapi geta produces empty exports by extracting the PDF from the .rmdoc archive.