Adding Popup Notifications In Pidgin

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After using this plugin for a few days, Pidgin kept locking up and I was able to track it down to Guifications…follow this tutorial at your own risk:)

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So I’ve been using Pidgin for not quite a week now and it really made me feel stupid for staying with MSN Messenger for so long.

This thing is more powerful, more flexible, utilizes plugins, much more lightweight, supports every kind of IM protocol…I could go on all day.

But, for everything that it does, there are a few things I do miss. As small and minute this inconvenience was, I really, really missed the little popup window in the lower right hand of the screen that showed me when someone signed in.

Here’s the main difference between open source software and proprietary software  for all you OSS haters. If a program doesn’t do something, someone out there who’s much smarter than I, has probably run into the same problem. Instead of being stuck with a crappy program that doesn’t do what you want, they can just write some code and viola (I know, it’s not quite that easy, but you get the idea). Your software now works the way YOU want. Not the way some corporation thinks it should work.

Installation and Setup

After a little searching, I found the answer. A simple plugin for Pidgin called Guifications2. Here’s how I set mine up.

1. download Guifications2 and install it (I actually installed it while Pidgin was still running and it worked just fine:)
2. Open Pidgin and go to ‘Tools’ –> ‘Plugins’
3. Check ‘Guifications 2.14′ and then click ‘Configure Plugin’ in the lower right
4. I left all the default options in the ‘General’ tab
   
5. Then I went to the ‘Notifications’ tab and unchecked everything but ‘Email’ and ‘Sign On’
   
6. I left the Default theme checked
   
7. Under advanced, I changed max visible guifications to 10, although this really isn’t going to make any difference, just a preference
    

Now you could stop here, but I wasn’t very impressed with the default popup box that came up. It was small and hard to read (no idea why they thought the default settings were a good idea)

If you want to really dig deep into the power of this plugin, here is how I modified the popup box look and feel.

1. you should still be in the Guifications Configuration panel. go back to the ‘Themes’ tab.
2. highlight the ‘Default’ theme (make sure it is highlighted blue, but also that you didn’t uncheck the box
3. click the ‘Edit’ button below and you should see a box like this:
   
4. now, from here, we have the ability to edit each and every specific popup individually (this could be a good or bad thing, depending on how many you left checked earlier and how much you want to change the default)
5. the main one I wanted to change was the box that showed up when people signed on. so click on ‘Sign On’
6. I changed the height and width to 200 each
   
7. I left the ‘Icon’ options as their defaults
8. under the first ‘Text’ option, I changed the font size to 14.
   

That’s about it. There are a million ways to configure just about everything in this plugin, so go to town and see what works best for you!

 Link to this page

 Link to this page

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