GIO tutorial: stream IO

This article is a short tutorial showing GIO’s file reading and writing functionality.

This is the 2nd part of my GIO tutorial series. Part 1 talks about simple file operations with GIO.

GIO tutorial: file operations

Recently I ported Exaile’s Files panel to use GIO instead of Python’s os module. Why? Simple: remote browsing.

Yes, you can now browse an SMB share or an SFTP server through the Files panel. Just mount the remote filesystem with gvfs-mount and enter the URL into the location bar. Previously Aren ported Exaile’s core to GIO as well, so remote files can be played just fine.

This is the kind of convenience you get out of using GIO/GVFS. In this article I’ll briefly explain what GIO is and how to do some basic file operations—similar to what the Files panel does—using GIO.

Screenshot of Exaile browsing and playing a file through GIO/GVFS

This is the 1st part of my GIO tutorial series. Part 2 talks about GIO stream reading and writing.