Pidgin IM plugins, hotkeys and shortcuts
I am totally obsessed right now with Pidgin. I like how I can integrate Skype into it, in fact I like full stop how extensible the whole thing is. You can skin it, you can add plug-ins, you can make it whatever way you want it. Due to its open-source nature, there’s an active developer community and I am talking to a couple of people at the moment via email and IM about their Pidgin development projects (you can see one of them here).
You see, to me, this is the exciting side of the web - the side that opens up to user participation and innovation. Web companies that don’t offer API’s and developer support are just shooting themselves in the foot basically, because what really drives a product are the users. If there is genuine passion among the users, and innovation with third party addons then you’re going to build a loyal customer base - period. If you shut out the developers and discourage innovation then you’re not really inspiring loyalty are you?
One Pidgin add-on which I think really kicks ass is Bot Sentry and I recently wrote about it for Make Use Of. But I was shocked at the total lack of interest in which the article was received. I think that is my first Make Use Of article that attracted zero comments (well the trackback from this article will make it comment number one). I really don’t understand why no-one liked it because spam is rapidly becoming a serious problem on instant messaging networks and Bot Sentry completely obliterated my spam problem instantly. That isn’t an exaggeration. It really did blow the spam away. You’d be amazed how many bots find the maths question “2+2″ difficult! No longer am I being hassled to talk dirty to a spam bot called Amy or buy Viagra from a bot called Leroy.
The plug-in I looked at tonight and subsequently installed is Pidgin Hotkeys. This allows you to control 4 Pidgin functions from the keyboard :
As you can see, I have chosen to only use two - “toggle the contact list” and “read messages”. I particularly like the toggle list one because by doing CTRL + ALT + Ä, I can bring the list up and down. I can then do CTRL + M to open a dialogue window that asks me who I want to talk to and I can then add a name :
Then just choose the person, then hit OK with the enter key, the chat window opens and off you go. Everything has been done by the keyboard. You haven’t even touched that mouse at all.
Which brings me to some more keyboard shortcuts for Pidgin. I’ll add to this list as I find more but here’s the ones I was able to find so far. Can you help me with more?
CTRL + M : Start new message
CTRL + C : Join a chat
CTRL + I : Get User Info
CTRL + L : View User Log
CTRL + B : Add buddy to contact list
CTRL + Q : Quit Pidgin
CTRL + A : Add/edit accounts
CTRL + U : View Plugins
CTRL + P : View Preferences
CTRL + T : File Transfers
CTRL + S : Mute Sounds
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May 25th, 2008 at 6:04 am
Hi, I have never had any problems with Spam on Pidgin. I guess you are a lot more popular than me!