Making pidgin behave better across gchat

Post date: Dec 10, 2012 5:46:58 AM

I don't know about anyone else, but gchat's stupid idiom of translating *text* to text bothers the crap out of me.

I finally got around to making a plugin, which can be found over here on dropbox.

If you're running on windows, the process is like this:

Step one:

install http://strawberryperl.com/download/5.10.1.5/strawberry-perl-5.10.1.5.msi

Important: It must be 5.10.x. Pidgin will not acknowledge newer versions.

Step two:

in %appdata%\.purple create a plugins folder (if it doesn't exist already) and in that folder, place the gchatformat.pl file

If you're unfamiliar with the %appdata% token, if you type that into Windows Explorer it takes you to the application data folder for the currently signed in user. It's a handy shortcut.

Step three:

Restart pidgin.

Step four:

In tools -> plugins, enable gchatformat

From this point on, you should be able to communicate with adium and pidgin users without asterisks or underscores being consumed automatically.

Note, this won't have any effect on anyone using an official google client. Nothing to be done there. :(

For anyone reading the plugin code.. Yes. All I'm doing is adding <b> </b> to the end of each message. It's stupid, but it works.