GIO is striving to provide a modern, easy-to-use VFS API that sits at the right level in the library stack. The goal is to overcome the shortcomings of GnomeVFS and provide an API that is so good that developers prefer it over raw POSIX calls. Among other things that means using GObject. It also means not cloning the POSIX API, but providing higher-level, document-centric interfaces. The abstract file system model of GIO consists of a number of interfaces and base classes for I/O and files: GFile reference to a file GFileInfo information about a file or filesystem GFileEnumerator list files in directories GDrive represents a drive GVolume represents a file system in an abstract way GMount represents a mounted file system Then there is a number of stream classes, similar to the input and output stream hierarchies that can be found in frameworks like Java: GInputStream read data GOutputStream write data GSeekable interface optionally implemented by streams to support seeking There are interfaces related to applications and the types of files they handle: GAppInfo information about an installed application GIcon abstract type for file and application icons Beyond these, GIO provides facilities for file monitoring, asynchronous I/O and filename completion. In addition to the interfaces, GIO provides implementations for the local case. Implementations for various network file systems are provided by the GVFS package as loadable modules. Other design choices which consciously break with the GnomeVFS design are to move backends out-of-process, which minimizes the dependency bloat and makes the whole system more robust. The backends are not included in GIO, but in the separate GVFS package. The GVFS package also contains the GVFS daemon, which spawn further mount daemons for each individual connection.

The GIO model of I/O is stateful: if an application establishes e.g. a SFTP connection to a server, it becomes available to all applications in the session; the user does not have to enter his password over and over again. One of the big advantages of putting the VFS in the GLib layer is that GTK+ can directly use it, e.g. in the filechooser. GIO comes with a gio-2.0.pc file that you should use together with pkg-config to obtain the necessary information about header files and libraries. See the pkg-config man page or the GLib documentation for more information on how to use pkg-config to compile your application. If you are using GIO on UNIX-like systems, you may want to use UNIX-specific GIO interfaces such as #GUnixInputStream, #GUnixOutputStream, #GUnixMount or #GDesktopAppInfo. To do so, use the gio-unix-2.0.pc file instead of gio-2.0.pc GIO inspects a few of environment variables in addition to the ones used by GLib. GIO uses these environment variables to locate MIME information. For more information, see the Shared MIME-info Database and the Base Directory Specification. The following environment variables are only useful for debugging GIO itself or modules that it loads. They should not be set in a production environment. This environment variable can be set to the name of a #GVfs implementation to override the default for debugging purposes. The #GVfs implementation for local files that is included in GIO has the name "local", the implementation in the gvfs module has the name "gvfs". This variable can be set to the name of a #GVolumeMonitor implementation to override the default for debugging purposes. The #GVolumeMonitor implementation for local files that is included in GIO has the name "unix", the hal-based implementation in the gvfs module has the name "hal". When this environment variable is set and GIO has been built with inotify support, a dump of diagnostic inotify information will be written every 20 seconds to a file named /tmp/gvfsdid.pid.