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Miranda IM

Posted by Mark | Filed under Software

At my office we are required to be on an IM client for the entire work day. This is partly due to the com­pany hav­ing mul­ti­ple offices and partly due to some peo­ple work­ing from home. In any case I did not much care for the client they had installed for me (Tril­lian Basic 3¹) and I had seen sev­eral arti­cles around the web about other IM clients. A few weeks back I decided to take the plug and start try­ing out some of those other clients.

Pid­gin

This was the first alter­nate IM client I looked at. It got bonus points for being multi-platform and open source, but was ulti­mately rejected as their web­site for it is so poor I couldn’t fig­ure out if it sup­ports sending/receiving files via the var­i­ous IM pro­to­cols I use. To be per­fectly fair, I prob­a­bly should have worked with Pid­gin a bit more to see if it could do what I wanted. How­ever I also knew I couldn’t be offline too much while play­ing around with dif­fer­ent clients and since they didn’t make the bits I needed obvi­ous; I quickly moved on.

Miranda

Miranda was the sec­ond IM client I looked at and is the one I cur­rently use. Like Pid­gin, it got bonus points for being open-source² and as an added plus, Miranda’s site was sim­ple enough for me to nav­i­gate and find the infor­ma­tion I needed. Unfor­tu­nately, a fresh install of Miranda is very basic and is miss­ing a num­ber of fea­tures I wanted/needed. How­ever Miranda appears to have an exten­sive com­mu­nity and there are many add-ons which brought it up to snuff.

• tab­SRMM: By default, Miranda dis­plays all new IM chats in dif­fer­ent win­dows; tab­SRMM lets you group those chats into a sin­gle win­dow. I con­fig­ured my copy to only group together chats from users in the same group of con­tacts. It makes it eas­ier for me to keep track of who/where I’m talk­ing to. And yes, those of my co-workers who have seen my IM client do say I’m rather anal in how detailed it is organized.
• Updater: Automag­i­cally checks for and installs any updates to Miranda and sup­ported plugins.
• Mod­ern Con­tact List: This plu­gin gives you more con­trol over the look&feel of the con­tact list, includ­ing theme support.
• GnuPG: Enables OpenPGP/GnuPG encryp­tion support.
• SecureIM: In the­ory this plu­gin enables Miranda to use the var­i­ous encryp­tion meth­ods of the var­i­ous IM pro­to­cols but I’ve not yet got­ten it to work. Then again I’ve not tried that hard to get it work­ing either.
• Meta­Con­tacts: Sev­eral peo­ple I know have mul­ti­ple IM accounts and will send me mes­sages using dif­fer­ent accounts at dif­fer­ent times. Since I only very rarely remove any­body from my con­tact list; this can get con­fus­ing remem­ber which con­tact is which. Meta­Con­tacts lets me com­bine var­i­ous screen names into 1 “meta­con­tact”. So if I have 3 screen names in my con­tact list for the same per­son, I can group them together under the same meta­con­tact. Basi­cally it keeps my con­tact list a bit cleaner and makes it eas­ier for me to con­tact peo­ple with­out hav­ing to remem­ber which screen name to send to.
• His­tory++: Makes viewing/searching through my IM chat logs easier.
• User­In­foEx: Gives you more fields to store more data about your con­tacts. It can import/export vCard files and even remind you when a contact’s birth­day is com­ing up.
• Star­tup­Sta­tus: Miranda IM sup­ports mul­ti­ple IM pro­to­cols. There is only one IM pro­to­col I need to con­nect to for work, but there are sev­eral oth­ers I like to con­nect for per­sonal rea­sons. But I also don’t want to be show­ing up as available/online/free for chat on those other pro­to­cols. This plu­gin lets me setup pro­files for what sta­tuses I want set for each pro­to­col and can trig­ger that pro­file on startup or after a spe­cific key­stroke. Mostly I use it to show up as online on the “work” IM pro­to­col and invis­i­ble on every­thing else.
• Smi­leyAdd: What fun would IM be with­out graph­i­cal smi­lies? Exactly and that’s why I’ve got this addon installed. I use the MSN Tango Smi­leys with it.

¹It always felt very buggy. It had high mem­ory usage and couldn’t han­dle be shifted to my 2nd mon­i­tor very well. I use Mul­ti­Mon to help orga­nize the stuff I am work­ing on/with and Tril­lian didn’t like it.
²Besides what Fire­fly fan could turn down an IM client named Miranda! *grin*

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