It doesn’t look like the user interface changes to Pidgin that I detailed here are going to go away any time soon, despite much concern about it. Last thing I read was that the developers had invoked the Gnome Defence, in that having too many useful features results in bloat (of course, no-one ever seems to remember that removing too many useful features results in Epiphany).
So, given that I simply cannot stand using it with the new interface, I’ve thrown together a very simple patch and a Debian package, replacing the chat window interface with that from an older version.
I’m not in a position to try the patch currently, but I’m glad it exists. Having read the mailing list and the main bug report on pidgin’s trac, the developers have been holding out on a “Our way is good. It sizes it for you. Why should it be any different?” frame of mind which isn’t a healthy open source method in my humble opinion. One went so far as to describe some users as having a “whitespace fetish”. Undiplomatic at best.
It just goes to show. In the FOSS world, as soon as you start thinking you know better than your users, they tell you about it, then if you don’t listen, do it their own way. I’ll be sticking with old versions until they either realise it’s a mistake, or find something else if they carry on catering for the indifferent users.
Personally, I find the way the text keeps moving around with typing notifications and resizing to accommodate the input highly annoying. I’m too hypersensitive to moving text meaning that somebody said something.