Search IM Buddies

[David K. Bainbridge]

I have been using Pidgin for a while and very much like the tool. One 
problem I am having is that I have so many buddies in my list that it is 
often difficult to locate the one I would like to find. I am aware that 
I can use the "Add Buddy" buddy option to locate a buddy, but what I 
would really find useful is a text field at the top/bottom of the buddy 
list into which I can type a name/alias and that would filter the buddy 
list based on matches. This would allow me to quickly locate the person 
to whom I would like to chat.An addition to this idea would to be the 
ability to add tags to buddies so that instead of static groupings I 
could call up a group of people via tags, i.e. "chat to everyone with 
the tags pidgin, plugin, and Perl". This is a bit like the gmail 
concept, which means if you like gmail you probably like tags, if you 
don't you don't.

I started looking at the plugin API specifications, but it appears that 
I can not augment the interface directly and can only use dialogs as a 
plugin, where I envision a permanent text field in the buddy list. Is it 
accurate to say that if I wanted to add this level of UI change to 
Pidgin it would require modifications to the core code as opposed to a 
feature addition via a plugin?

cheers,
/dkb