How does pidgin work

The download is free from pidgin. Once installed, the Pidgin app has customizable interfaces and options that make it very flexible. You can organize contacts, custom smileys, customize file transfer and group chats. Moreover, you can set preferences for any feature you normally use in apps of this kind, including the look and feel the connection, audio, presence, and availability, chat logging, etc.

Pidgin has one thing that many other IMs of its kind lack — a lot of plug-ins that make it very powerful and that make it possible for users to tailor it to their tastes. I find the following plug-ins useful if not necessary:. On the downside, Pidgin IM is absent from the Mac platform. Also, Skype is not supported. But what bugs me more is that it is not natively a VoIP app. That would make it a great tool for VoIP, which the new way to go for voice and video communication.

Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Select personalised content. Create a personalised content profile. Measure ad performance. Some protocols impose a maximum file size on the icon or certain dimensions or certain file types. Pidgin will try to resize and convert the icon as needed to fit within the constraints of a given protocol.

Sometimes this fails and shows you an error message. If you experience problems, you may want to try resizing the icon yourself before setting it. Pidgin itself for the chat window will scale icons up or down to 32x32 for display in the buddy list and the infopane. In general, to maintain the aspect ratio, you should begin with a square icon. The easiest thing to do is ask your friend to put it up on YouTube or some equivalent service.

Alternatively, you could buy it on DVD, if available. The mouse-over tooltip on the infopane also has her full-size buddy icon, for a quick fix. Additionally, clicking the icon in the infopane should also enlarge it. We believe that, by adding a second line of text to each buddy list entry, we're able to show more information about each buddy on the buddy list.

The "Big List," as we call it, shows status text and idle time concisely and attractively. Most importantly, it puts the buddy icon in the list, making it far easier to locate buddies within a large list where names are harder to pick out than images.

Due to the increased usability of this interface, we have made it the default. We are aware that some people feel more comfortable using an interface more similar to IM clients they may have used in the past. The 'Big List' can be disabled by un-checking "Show buddy details" in the Buddies menu.

It's likely you have inadvertently combined some buddies into contacts when you did not intend to do so. To correct this you need to find which contact the logs are associated with. Right-click that entry in the buddy list and click Expand. Drag out the buddies that do not belong in the contact. You inadvertently created a contact from two buddies. Hover over each buddy in the destination group and watch the tooltips that appear.

You'll see the "missing" buddy in one of them. Right-click that entry in the buddy list, click Expand, and then drag the buddy that does not belong out to the group. Watch the buddy list carefully; a bar will appear to show you where the buddy will go if you are in the right location. Right click a buddy on your list and at the bottom of the menu click "Expand". Then just drag other screen names to the same person below it. When you're done, click on the arrow to collapse them.

When the contact is collapsed, Pidgin will select a buddy to display based on the status of the buddies in the contact, and their order.

If you use the Alias function, by either highlighting a buddy and pressing F2 or right-clicking and selecting "Alias Yes and no. Pidgin uses an algorithm to determine which buddy is selected. If you right click on a contact and select expand, you can see an ordered list of the buddies in that contact. It computes which is most available as follows:. With this search pattern, you should be able to drag the buddies in that contact into an order that will yield reasonable results for that contact most of the time.

While this will be sufficient for most people most of the time, we recognize that a small minority of users may need to control things more precisely. If installed and loaded, this plugin allows for some modifications to the algorithm that Pidgin uses. Specifically, you can weight certain accounts to be either more likely to be chosen or less likely to be chosen. This cannot, however, be done on a per-buddy basis with the existing plugin.

See Sean's blog entry on the subject for the rationale behind this change. However, as of Pidgin 2. Pidgin shows six "popular" saved statuses in the status selector. These are your six most recently used statuses, offset by a weight. Pidgin sorts all your saved statuses by the timestamp when they were last used. And then, for each time you've used a status, the timestamp is increased by one day.

If you are upgrading from 1. As a result, the initial contents of the menu will be somewhat random. It will settle over the first few uses of distinct states into the behavior described above. Pidgin can only use saved states for Auto Away. You need to create and save a named state first. These libraries already work in Windows. The Pidgin build process needs to be updated appropriately to enable the functionality.

Patches to make this happen are welcome. Currently, the command-line gstreamer-properties program is used. On other systems, Pidgin makes its best guess as to which device to use. A plugin is planned to support this functionality on other systems. We plan to implement these features, but it is a daunting task.

The time available to the developers who work on these features is limited, and so any work on these features proceeds slowly. Window 11 SE Downgrade. Disney Plu TikTok. Windows 11 Default Browser Block. Teams in Windows 11 Taskbar. Smart TVs Ads.

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Connect to a Hidden Wi-Fi Network. Change the Size of the Touch Keyboard. Check Bluetooth Device Battery Life. Reader Favorites Take Screenshot on Windows. Mount an ISO image in Windows. Click Save. Pigdin should connect instantly and you can begin using it. Add Amherst Users Outside of Your Department When you use Pidgin, you will automatically see the other members of your department in your buddy list by default.

In the Buddy's username field, enter the person you would like to add in the following format: username xmpp. If you'd like, you can give your own alias to this user, otherwise they will just appear on your buddy list with their full name.