Opening files and pages

The open command views a file or web page in a new tab:

open diagram.png              image, in an image tab
open clip.mp4                 video, played in a video tab
open track.mp3                audio, queued in the audio tab
open notes.md                 Markdown, rendered in a markdown tab
open https://example.com      web page, embedded in a page tab
open page example.com         same, for a bare address

Full form: open [external] [page] <target>. Relative paths resolve against the tab's working directory. What kind of tab you get depends on the file type — see Image viewer, Video player, Audio player, Markdown preview, and Embedded web pages. Every tab it opens joins the current tab's group and can be closed from the strip with its × button.

Files opened from a remote file navigator use the same viewer or editor as local files. Janissary reads the remote content into its session cache first; saving an editor tab writes the change back to the remote host. If that write fails, the editor remains marked as changed and the notifications feed reports the failure.

Targets with an http:// or https:// scheme are treated as web addresses; the page keyword forces web interpretation and assumes https:// for a bare address like example.com. Anything else is a file path. Only http and https pages can be opened — other schemes are rejected as invalid.

Opening outside the app: open external

open external <target> hands the target to the operating system instead of opening a tab:

open external photo.jpg           the OS image viewer (Preview on macOS)
open external clip.mp4            your configured video player (QuickTime Player by default)
open external https://example.com the OS default browser

A few formats can only be opened this way — open clip.mkv and open track.wma go straight to an external player with no tab. Which application gets a video or an audio file is yours to set; see Video player and Audio player.

open external is refused for a remote file. An external application could change only the local cached copy, with no way to write that change back to the remote host.

Opening a file to change it: edit

edit <target> opens a file for editing rather than viewing, and picks the editor by file type:

edit src/index.ts                 the plain-text editor
edit Makefile                     the plain-text editor, extension or not
edit diagram.png                  the image editor
edit notes.md:42                  the plain-text editor, cursor on line 42

Images are the one file type with an editor of their own — everything else, including Markdown, opens as text. That does mean edit diagram.png can't show you a PNG's raw bytes; there's no way to ask for that. A :<line> suffix is accepted anywhere and ignored where it makes no sense.

Wildcards

A path with shell wildcard characters opens every matching file, up to 10 at a time:

open shots/*.png

The pattern expands exactly as your shell would expand it. Past 10 matches, the first 10 open and a note reports how many matched in total. A pattern matching nothing reports that too. Wildcards only apply to file paths, never web addresses.

Errors

Mistakes are reported in the current tab before anything opens:

• A malformed invocation prints the usage line: open [external] [page] <target>.
• A file that doesn't exist gets a not-found message.
• A file type with no viewer is reported as unsupported.
• A malformed or non-http(s) address is reported as invalid.