Hiding away buddies in pidgin

Pidgin 2.4.2 is recently released and it has got few good editions like - turning off typing notification option, send button, escape key, crash fixes, plugin load problem across OS, toggle picture size etc. Good ones kicked out !!

Still so much, but not enough. I was quite disappointed, with seeing the long pending bug still remain unfixed and community decided to survive with those craps. So I decided to put my finger down and eat at least one crap which had me from long time.

Pidgin (still) doesn't have an option to hide away and idle buddies from buddy list. For those who longs on a numbers of account and so many friends added, its high chance that many of them are away or idle (ya, people just left from their desktop --- even OS crashes crashes after long running and all those power saving initiatives, no one turns them off). In that case buddy list looks a bit clumsy as in my case where I see every time at least 80% of my buddy list is either idle or away.

So yesterday, I put my hand down to include this feature. Writing it wasn't difficult, mindset to put my hands down, few chilled beers and a night, that's all. Considering that there is already stuff to hide offline buddies, it was a few hours task.

Yeah, building that for windows was a little problematic for me --- more I work on windows I feel like home away.

Few snapshots:

Hope this would be useful.

You can download the patch over pidgin 2.4.2. I suggest you to use the patch. But in case you are more interested in complete source code you can get that from here. In case you want to try out windows binary, its here.

In case of patch, run patch command with -p1 option from parent directory of pidgin-2.4.2 source.

Note: complete soure and executable has pidgin about box modified. However patch isn't. Its the same patch which is submitted to pidgin team.

That's all for the day.

Adieu ...