Leaves the shell for the reading view. Pressing q there brings you back with your scrollback intact — to the shell, wherever you had been before it. Typing a note’s name on its own does the same thing as open.

open goes to a page, and there are three kinds of thing here. A note has a page because Hugo rendered it. A file you made has one too: /file/, which reads it back out of the same place the shell keeps it and shows it as the text it is — so open /tmp/notes.txt works, and so does clicking it in a listing. The machine’s own files (/etc/passwd, ~/.zshrc) have no page at all, and open says so and points at cat, which is how you read those.

Nothing on /file/ was published: it is the one page on this site that is built out of your browser rather than out of the vault, and it says as much every time.

A directory can be opened when it has an _index.md, since then there is something to read: open work goes to that note. A directory without one is only a place, so open does the one thing it can and cds you into it.

.. and . count as directories, so open . reads the note for where you are and open .. the one above it. At ~ that note is the vault’s own _index.md, which is also where the ~ at the start of any path goes.