I have recently, two months or so ago, made the switch from vendor provided IM clients to the open source gAIM IM client. gAIM has many features and I wanted to list the few plugins I use, and special settings i use.
Plugins I have enabled:
- Auto-reconnect (in gaim) – auto reconnects
- Buddy state notification (in gaim) – checks buddy state
- ExtPlacement (in gaim) – extra placement options
- History (in gaim) – pulls up your log history of last chat with this user
- I’dle mak’er (in gaim) – lets you set idle time
- Iconfiy on away (in gaim)
- Release notification (in gaim) – checks for new releases
- System tray icon (in gaim) – minimize to system tray
- Text replacement (in gaim) – replace ‘u’ with ‘you’, etc
- Timestamp (in gaim) – enable timestamping
- WinGaim options (in gaim) – features for windows
- Off-the-Record messaging – provides private and secure chat conversations over any IM protocol
- gaim-encryption – prefered as a backup to ‘off-the-record’ it provides encryption over any IM protocol
- Extended preferences – a few cosmetic items about hiding buttons, hidding buddy list at start, etc
- meanwhile – a great plugin to allow support for IBM’s sametime client
- Google for the “Medium specific 2 – carbonize, YIm7 smiley pack by webcrawler
Notable Configuration items in gAIM (be sure to restart after installing plugins):
- always show timestamps
- ignore font sizes (i have problems with yahoo IM fonts at times when other person using trillian)
- highlight misspelled words (at gaim install, install the spelling features by checking English spellcheck support)
- Log all instant messages and chats
I threw this together, but for those of you who havent added the plugins, they are very useful. My favorite is logging and the history plugin enabled, i used to always hit escape accidentally and close IM conversations, now when reopening the conversation with that buddy, the history of last discussions are re-displayed for me.
Take care (I may update this some later)