Miranda IM vs gaim?

[edmicman]

I've used gaim for a long time, but I'm thinking of trying Miranda out due to it's small memory footprint, and it seems like gaim has a bit of a memory leak or something. What I'm wondering is, has anyone converted from gaim to Miranda and got it set up similarly? I have to say it's a bit overwhelming with all the plugins, and no clear way to tell which ones I want. It is cool that after the vanilla install if Miranda it's running at around 600k minimized, vs 20 some-odd MB for gaim. But how do I set up the following in Miranda?

I only use the AIM protocol. Where are the away messages and profiles? WHere's the "Get Info" for users that displays this?

Gaim has a tooltip that when you hover over a contact it pops up idle time, away message, some more summary info, etc.

Tabbed IM windows - is this possible?

Buddy icons/avatars? I can't seem to see anything at all about this in Miranda...can they at least show up in an IM window? It would be nice if they could be part of the contact list, too, ie, part of the popup or something.

I'll check the Miranda forums, too, but thought maybe someone here has run into the same deal. Thanks!

 

[Inappropriate4AT]

Never heard of it, but it sounds like my type of IM. I'm sic of the huge footprint and rollover/audio ads of AIM. Think I'll give this a try.

 

[igowerf]

Yeah. There are a couple things that I'd like to figure out for Miranda or Gaim too:

- Cascading tabs in the chat window. GAIM forces me to scroll and Miranda doesn't seem to even have tabs.
- Buddy icons aren't a big deal, but it would be nice to be able to see them in the buddy list (Miranda).
- Hide EVERYTHING to the system tray when I put up an away message (hides all messages, contacts, away message window, etc). In GAIM, the away message window has a taskbar button. I can't remember how Miranda does it.

 

[clamum]

Originally posted by: edmicman
But how do I set up the following in Miranda?

I only use the AIM protocol. Where are the away messages and profiles? WHere's the "Get Info" for users that displays this?

Gaim has a tooltip that when you hover over a contact it pops up idle time, away message, some more summary info, etc.

Tabbed IM windows - is this possible?

Buddy icons/avatars? I can't seem to see anything at all about this in Miranda...can they at least show up in an IM window? It would be nice if they could be part of the contact list, too, ie, part of the popup or something.

I'll check the Miranda forums, too, but thought maybe someone here has run into the same deal. Thanks!

I use AIM and ICQ protocols...

As far as away messages and profiles for AIM, I don't see a read away message action, and the show profile tries to load a website that doesn't work.

The tooltip popup might be available in a plugin.

Tabbed IM windows... doesn't come standard, again maybe a plugin.

Buddy icons or avatars, I have no idea.

 

[edmicman]

Originally posted by: igowerf
Yeah. There are a couple things that I'd like to figure out for Miranda or Gaim too:

- Cascading tabs in the chat window. GAIM forces me to scroll and Miranda doesn't seem to even have tabs.
- Buddy icons aren't a big deal, but it would be nice to be able to see them in the buddy list (Miranda).
- Hide EVERYTHING to the system tray when I put up an away message (hides all messages, contacts, away message window, etc). In GAIM, the away message window has a taskbar button. I can't remember how Miranda does it.

The new gaim beta (2.0) fixes the away message thing. I still think I prefer gaim, at least out of the box, but damn! it's taking up 24-30MB of memory right now. Miranda's steadily between 600k and ~2MB for me. Holy crap! If only it wasn't such a PITA to set up to get any extra functionality. From what I can tell I need plugins to implement smileys, avatars, and to get any sort of extended functionality out of the contact list. Plus I can't say for sure, but I think the logging history sucks compared to gaim, too. Maybe gaim can get their crap together by the time the final 2.0 is released...

 

[igowerf]

Originally posted by: edmicman

Originally posted by: igowerf
Yeah. There are a couple things that I'd like to figure out for Miranda or Gaim too:

- Cascading tabs in the chat window. GAIM forces me to scroll and Miranda doesn't seem to even have tabs.
- Buddy icons aren't a big deal, but it would be nice to be able to see them in the buddy list (Miranda).
- Hide EVERYTHING to the system tray when I put up an away message (hides all messages, contacts, away message window, etc). In GAIM, the away message window has a taskbar button. I can't remember how Miranda does it.

The new gaim beta (2.0) fixes the away message thing. I still think I prefer gaim, at least out of the box, but damn! it's taking up 24-30MB of memory right now. Miranda's steadily between 600k and ~2MB for me. Holy crap! If only it wasn't such a PITA to set up to get any extra functionality. From what I can tell I need plugins to implement smileys, avatars, and to get any sort of extended functionality out of the contact list. Plus I can't say for sure, but I think the logging history sucks compared to gaim, too. Maybe gaim can get their crap together by the time the final 2.0 is released...

Do the tabbed chat windows cascade into multiple rows? Right now, GAIM forces the user to scroll to see new tabs.

 

[duragezic]

For Miranda you'll want a history plugin (something like historyviewer or history++ IIRC) for sure. There is tons of tabbed IM window plugins. I'm using Scriver myself, but theres tab_srmm, and a minimal one called srmm_mite.

I'm not sure what you mean by hide everything. Personally I set the Miranda window to minimize to tray after 30 seconds of inactivity, and the away message window goes away in like 5 seconds automatically.

I don't use AIM so I don't know about the user info, very odd that something like that would be missing though! Not sure about the tooltip popup on mouse over.. I've heard other people want it too, so I dont think theres a plugin for it unfortunately (I guess that's the ONE thing I like about GAIM), though check to be sure.

And buddy icons/avatars, I'm pretty sure I've seen plugins for that, but thank god that garbage isn't installed by default. Nothing worse than loading an IM program and having it take up half the screen with buttons and icons!

My Miranda ICQ window looks like this. THat's what I'm talking about. Minimal, very low memory usage, very stable, and still very functional with plugins. Yeah plugins might be a pain but take an hour and pimp our your Miranda, then save the plugin directory between reinstalls. I keep my profile, icons, backgrounds, plugins etc so I can copy them over whenever I reinstall.

 

[igowerf]

Originally posted by: duragezic
I'm not sure what you mean by hide everything. Personally I set the Miranda window to minimize to tray after 30 seconds of inactivity, and the away message window goes away in like 5 seconds automatically.

When I set my status to away and minimize Miranda, I want all the windows (contact list, message window, etc) to minimize into a single tray icon. I don't want to see any taskbar icons or popups or anything until I click on the tray icon again.

I tried tab_srmm once and it made my chat window look really weird so I gave up and switched back to GAIM... I'll give Scriver a try later.

 

[edmicman]

Just an update....after playing with Miranda this afternoon (heh, instead of doing real work!) I've come to the conclusion that basically Miranda is to ICQ what gaim is to AIM - basically each is a cleaner, minimal derivative of it's parent. Not that that's a bad thing, that just explains some of the default settings. Being that I haven't used ICQ in probably 6 years, that's probably a lot of why I was having difficulties adapting to Miranda. I did find a number of plugins (and I guess a new Miranda is supposed to fix the away message/profile things of AIM? I ended up grabbing a new AIM DLL from the nightly builds) and it's closer to how I'd been using gaim. I think for most of my use, gaim probably will still be my main program, and hopefully some of the memory footprint gets cleaned up once they release the final 2.0. But I think I'm going to try Miranda at work for a week or two and see if it grows on me...I do like some of it's features.

And igowerf, what you are wanting is indeed fixed in the new gaim (v2.0). They've redone the away message system, and everything minimizes to the system tray. I haven't used the normal AIM client in a long time, but i think they've improved on that even, in that the away message is a (small) part of the buddy list, so you don't even have to worry about minimizing that part at all. Everything compacts to the system tray. At least they got that part right in the newest beta. Heh, there are some other issues that take some getting used to if you've been using gaim all along, though. They've completely redone a lot of the preferences and interface. At least it's good we have a lot of choices!

 

[konichiwa]

Can you elaborate how you got Miranda to work more fluidly as an AIM-only client? I love it compared to the memory-hogging gAIM but the inability to read Status/Away messages is unbearable and seems like a standard function that an AIM user needs...I want Miranda to work because I feel that it's a much better program but without being able to read status messages, it's crap!

 

[PseudoKnight]

My Miranda:
http://img463.imageshack.us/my.php?image=miranda9hq.jpg

I haven't touched the design in well over a year.

Man, if you just need it for AIM, you can unload all the ICQ/MSN plugins and have it use even less memory.

I'm a fan of popup + neweventnotify. There's even a plugin that integrates with those and tells you what new song is playing on Winamp.

I've never really read status messages, (standard function, my ass) but there are ways to do it. (by default you can just go to the user details) However, to have it pop-up when you mouse-over... that's another story. There are plugins to notify you of status changes. (last seen plugin shows when they were last on... which rocks) Really, you can just browse the plugins and find one that fits your needs. There's so many. I think Modern Contact List would fit your needs. You can make it put people's status message right under their name.

Man, so many more plugins last I looked. Gotta love Miranda.

 

[edmicman]

Here are the Miranda plugins I have enabled:

aimoscar.dll- AIM OSCAR Plugin - Alpa 8.3
chat.dll
clist_nicer.dll - CList Nicer+(Unicode)
help.dll
historypp.dll - History++
import.dll
irc.dll
loadavatars.dll - Avatar service
mtooltip.dll - mToolTip
png2dib.dll
smileyadd.dll - SmileyAdd
srmm.dll - Send/Receive Messages (Unicode)

I'm not sure which ones are defaults, so I threw all of them on the list. For the most part, that's the setup I have that gets me close to gaim's funcitonality.

From what I can tell, avatars (buddy icons) are not supported in Miranda for the AIM protocol, though they may be supported by the new AIM OSCAR protocol? I guess the OSCAR thing is some new experimental something or other, and they're catching up with that. What irks me is that other programs (like gaim) have had that extra AIM functionality all along, and Miranda still apparently doesn't. I think it harkens back to my earlier comment, where Miranda is really more of an extension of ICQ, with other protocols supported, whereas gaim is an extension of AIM, with other protocols supported. This sort of disappointed me in that I'm looking for solely a lightweight, small, opensource AIM client. I still wonder if it'd be possible to take the gaim libraries and write a Windows native client in C# or something, but that's a bit beyond my expertise...

I also thing having so many plugins are a slight detriment to Miranda. I know I felt completely overwhelmed at first (still do to some extent), and it takes too much time/work to get it to a state where you want it, minimalist or no. I like a minimalist approach, but there's things I've become used to using gaim (and the original AIM / AIMHack clients before that) that I just can't recreate in Miranda. Viewing profiles, away messages....Miranda loads them in an HTML box (I think using an IE control?) and you can tell - it's slow, all the formatting is buggy. I prefer to see their profile, away message, etc., but remove the formatting (all the inane bright colors, fonts,etc.). Not to mention the buddy icons. Sure, I don't *need* them, but its a fun personal touch that it should be able to handle.

Anyway, just my $.02.