I see now that I can change the path in the GUI under preferences, but once I change it I cannot access databases in the "data" folder anymore.
Right. In a single BaseX instance, you can only work with a single database directory.
It seems that in db:open I can specify to open a particular file of a database, but I cannot specify the path to a database in a folder different from the default one: is that right? Thanks!
Right.