Don’t hate the gaim
If you’re still using the same old instant messaging clients, and you’ve got 17 systray icons and 36 usernames, it’s time to simplify. Your solution is gaim.
Gaim is a long-running open-source project to consolidate instant messaging across multiple services into one application. It’s not the only one of its kind, but it’s the best. Trillian, which I used some time ago, perpetually crashed on my system and lacks the features of gaim.
Gaim provides me a wealth of features that I’ve been wanting in an IM client for years. Some of these features seem obvious and intuitive, but they’ve been missing from the “officially supported” clients for years. Examples:
- Assign your contacts an alias (uh, how about their real name) so you don’t have to remember who XoXhaWtGiRLXoX is.
- Ignore your buddies’ font choices. No more 12pt, Courier New, pink-on-black crap.
- Many smiley packs available.
- Tabbed IM windows.
- Mouse-over buddies in the buddy list window to see their away messages (no more waiting for “Get Info”).
- “Buddy pouncing” to set up actions triggered on a buddy’s action, e.g. signing on. Useful for annoying friends.
January 18th, 2006 at 8:49 pm
wow, you are an idiot. first off trillain is 10x beter than gaim. trillain has many more features than gaim. Trillain is skinnable, can add smiley packs(it has a lot more of those than gaim for that matter) and has numerous plugins. top that.
January 18th, 2006 at 10:31 pm
Actually, I’ve tried to use Trillian twice and had it (1) completely destabilize Windows, or (2) failed to initialize. This was on different installations of Windows, btw. I do use Trillian at work without a problem.
p.s. Go fuck yourself.
March 26th, 2006 at 12:33 pm
LOL… P’owned! I use PGaim now and I like it… not as many features as Trillian, but it’s definitely more stable. Again Nate, you got P’owned.
April 3rd, 2006 at 6:05 pm
LOL!! Trillian sucks. It also accepts those stupid javascript commands from a browser. So people can do nasty things to your aim client by just visiting a page. But with gaim? You just laugh at it. But I do agree that gaim doesn’t act the best under windows, but then again it technically wasn’t made for windows… Plus pyGaim is here. So now making plugins is going to be easy as pie.
April 16th, 2006 at 6:00 pm
Heh… I use both Trillian and Gaim. I like ‘em both. I tend to prefer Trillian, since file transfer and direct connect work much better, but when I’m working on Linux I don’t have much choice in the matter.
June 5th, 2006 at 9:59 pm
How or where can I find my own icon in Gaim, & not just my friend’s icon?
Thank you.
June 22nd, 2006 at 8:25 am
trillian sucks dick, its laggy as hell, it crashes, it takes up 13% cpu , its like having a media player open, bullshit, trillian sucks, fuck direct connect ill use gaim, and nate stfu noob, it aint better, trillian is a media player, without the actual media, lol
April 18th, 2007 at 11:03 am
This is old and I don’t know why I stumbled upon it. Trillian has never made my Windows unstable and I would say is much more amazing than gaim. Having said that, I primarily use linux now, so I use gaim. Trillian might be cool, but it’s not worth using Windows for, that’s for sure.