feat: add disabled tools configuration

[cs50victor]

Block specific tools from being called or listed via config files or environment variable.

• Config files: ~/.config/mcp/disabled_tools, ~/.mcp_disabled_tools, ./mcp_disabled_tools
• Environment: MCP_DISABLED_TOOLS=server/tool,server/*
• Supports glob patterns

[avishefi]

What about a whitelist of tools per server? Should both be supported?

[cs50victor]

the reasoning behind having tool filtering work this way is to allow users to prevent a few destructive tool calls. It's meant to work similarly to a .gitignore or .gitignore_global. having a list of allowed tools can get verbose quickly.

i.e I want to disable running code in the browser ( browser_run_code) but allow all other tool calls.

  ┌───────────────┬───────┐
  │  MCP Server   │ Tools │
  ├───────────────┼───────┤
  │ chrome        │ 26    │
  ├───────────────┼───────┤
  │ chrome-shared │ 26    │
  ├───────────────┼───────┤
  │ deepwiki      │ 3     │
  ├───────────────┼───────┤
  │ exa           │ 2     │
  ├───────────────┼───────┤
  │ grep          │ 1     │
  ├───────────────┼───────┤
  │ playwright    │ 22    │
  ├───────────────┼───────┤
  │ Total         │ 80    │
  └───────────────┴───────┘

I also think most people are leaning towards allowing the model gather a lot of context without handholding.

[avishefi]

I see Amp doing includeTools on mcp.json inside a skill, still haven't decided which is better. I suppose both have a place with mcp-cli, it's a usage pattern.

[cs50victor]

yh. this feature is inspired by amp. i have Bash(mcp-cli:*) in my settings.json, so that's why filtering seems logicaly. let me know how you are using mcp-li.

[philschmid]

Hey thank you for the PR. I worked on this as well and this is now shipped as 0.3.0 full changes here: https://github.com/philschmid/mcp-cli/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md#030---2026-01-22