Meta
I have been using Pidgin as a multi-protocol client for my instant messenger services since about 2008. The contents of this page originally relate to problems I was having with pidgin on a windows system. It was written in the Autumn of 2008 and both windows and pidgin have had many new releases or updates since then. I can’t imagine that it remains of much use. i.e. this page is out of date and not very useful now. I recognised on copying the page from its source that the page required amendment so in Dec 2014, I needed to document the installation of themes I moved the 2008 content to the comments section.
Themes
In 2014, as we had moved on from Windows XP, the theme management features of Pidgin became attractive to allow it to fit in more easily.
One approach is to edit the GTK preferences, document on this page,
and/or to install new bubbles and smilies from
One needs to be careful how one unpacks these, the themes need to have the correct name hierarchy, i.e. %appdata%\.purple\themes\${Theme Name}\purple\*, some installation techniques may leave one with the theme name reepated twice.
Protocol Helpers
Lync & TRM need SIPE, available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/sipe/, when installing this using the NSIS installer, this worked fine, as you’d expect since there’s little google evidence that it doesn’t.
Skype needs its own plugin