Pidgin IM

Posted by Trinkit on May 29th, 2007

It’s widely known now amongst it’s fanbase that the IM program GAIM has been renamed into Pidgin. When known as GAIM it was still one of the best IM clients around. With the transition to Pidgin, it’s gotten several improvements and is getting better constantly. The transition has left the client a little unstable, but, as with most open source software these issues are taken care of quite quickly. It allows you to organize your contact lists into groups, and it also seems capable of handling multiple accounts per protocol without merging the contact lists, something quite a number of IM programs lack, even trillian has a bit of trouble with this. Pidgin also supports a myriad of IM and chat protocols. AIM, Bonjour, Gadu Gadu, Google Talk, Groupwise, ICQ, IRC, MSN, QQ, Silc, Simple, Sametime, XMPP, Yahoo!, and Zephyr are all supported. It leaves me wondering what protocols, if any, are missing. It also sports a feature called buddy pounce. This feature allows you to attach actions to certain events and notify you or play a sound. It’s pretty handy to have.

At the moment, I don’t think I could recommend another IM client, all the rest are horribly bloated and slow in comparison. The biggest feature missing from Pidgin is no video chat. I don’t feel that’s much of a loss though, because if I wanted video chat, I’d get an application specifically made for it, not use the junk attached to an instant messenger client as an afterthought.

Link: Pidgin IM

2 Responses

  1. Pistos Says:

    Reading over your post, it just brings to mind how Kopete ( http://kopete.kde.org/ ) has all those features, too, but with one difference: <troll>it looks good</troll>. ;)

    Seriously, I’ve generally disliked Gnome/GTK apps and preferred KDE/Qt apps solely on the basis of appearance. But hey, whatever floats your boat. :)

  2. Trinkit Says:

    Unfortunately, I’m still running Windows, so Kopete doesn’t even make the running.

    If you’re running a *n?x OS and using KDE, I’d be willing to say Kopete’s the only decent choice.

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