Slant community chat on DiscoursePro Very lightweight
Pidgin is very lightweight both in its minimalistic UI as well as RAM/CPU usage, especially when compared to competition like trillian.
Pro Highly customisable with plugins
Pidgin not only has a large plugin library built-in, but also an array of third party plugins for a variety of functions.
Pro Support for a wide range of additional chat services
Pidgin not only supports IRC, it also supports plenty of other services such as AIM, Google Talk, MSN, ICQ and plenty of others. This way, you can have all of your conversations in the same app and won't have to deal with multiple chat windows being open.
Con Can't be used with self-signed server certificates
Many places have their own jabber servers, and many self-sign their certs. Pidgin is hard-coded to refuse these.
Con Support for enlarged fonts for visually impaired is less than perfect
Typing messages with enlarged fonts sometimes makes that part of the UI glitch. It will change size (grow and shrink) as you type, making it hard to follow.
Con No native VoIP support
While there are plugins there is no built in support for VoIP in Pidgin which is time consuming to implement instead of being baked in from the jump.
Con Chat logs are in SQLite DB.
Plaintext (or XML/markup) logs are not available.
Con Chat logging enabled by default
Problematic for encrypted chats.
Pro Requires no installation and is very lightweight
Very light on system resources and extremely fast, Miranda IM requires no installation and can be made to fit on a single floppy disk or USB drive
Pro Insanely customisable
You can see all the plugins available for Miranda here.
Know any negative aspects of this option?
Option marked as Out of DateComments
Welcome to the Slant Community
Stop spending hours researching
Slant is written by a community helping you be informed. Let us know what you’re passionate about to get an awesome personalized feed.