Pidgin Background image

The two best Instant Messengers out there are Miranda and Pidgin. Miranda with a ton of plugins allows you to manipulate just about everything, you name it you can do it in Miranda but this level of complexity is more suited for those who love to tinker.

Then there is Pidgin, Pidgin take a no frills approach to it's instant messenger, staying ahead of the rest(in my opinion) of the other universal IM's in the way of protocols and stability, this basic approach is more for the "Set it and Forget it" crowd that is not interested in pushing the envelope of tweaking the application.

I like both applications and often find myself going back and forth between them but lately with Pidgin I have gotten tired of looking at it's dull white screen so I set out to see if the ability exists to change the background an sure enough you can, so after some digging and experimenting I have my Pidgin running with a cool background.

See here:
http://www.archiefamily.com/users/Paul/images/1.png

The following is what I found and how I added a background image to my Pidgin Portable IM:

1. Start by finding the "gtkrc" file in the following directory:
\PortableApps\PidginPortable\Data\settings

2. Open "gtkrc" with a text editor and add the following code:

Copy below this line------------------------------------------------------------

#The following line is the path where you choose to keep your background images:
pixmap_path "./Data/settings/.purple/backgrounds"
style "my-blist" {
#The follwoing line is the name of your background image:
bg_pixmap[NORMAL] = "NCC1701-5.png"
text[NORMAL] = "#ffffff"
#this makes the text white, if you want black, take this code:
#text[NORMAL] = "#000000"
bg[NORMAL] = "#993300"
base[NORMAL] = "#993300"
GtkTreeView::odd_row_color = ""
GtkTreeView::even_row_color = ""
}
widget "*pidgin_blist_treeview" style "my-blist"

Copy above this line------------------------------------------------------------

The pixmap_path starts at the PidginPortable directory.

The text[NORMAL] line will change the font color of the buddy list categories, in my case I had to use white against my background, use this web site to change the #ffffff value to something to your liking if you are not actually going to use a background image:

http://www.psyclops.com/tools/rgb/

Finding actual backgrounds for Pidgin is next to impossible so I had to create my own, the following is my background and then a couple others I found:

http://www.archiefamily.com/users/Paul/images/NCC1701-5.png

http://www.archiefamily.com/users/Paul/images/fedora_bg.jpg

http://www.archiefamily.com/users/Paul/images/pidgin-background.png

http://www.archiefamily.com/users/Paul/images/fedpidbg.png

I hope this helps and makes sense.

Paul.

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Edit - 10/14/09 Added a few more backgrounds

http://www.archiefamily.com/users/Paul/images/BSG2.png

http://www.archiefamily.com/users/Paul/images/discovery.png

http://www.archiefamily.com/users/Paul/images/hal9000.png

http://www.archiefamily.com/users/Paul/images/predator1.png
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Edit - 4-5-2011 One more background

http://www.archiefamily.com/users/Paul/images/drwho1.png