Proposal to change chat window layout

[Sadrul Habib Chowdhury]

* Alex Willmer had this to say on [23 Sep 2008, 19:17:11 +0100]:
[snip]
> I'd like to swap the chat history and user list, so the chat history is
> on the right.

I think a plugin can do it fairly easily. Having said that, it might be
an interesting idea to add some finer granularity to some of Pidgin's UI
operations. For example, for conversations, if a plugin wanted to have a
different UI setup (e.g. have the userlist on the right, or have a
resizable input area, or use a different widget for the conversation
history (e.g. Webkit, XText etc.)), then instead of duplicating all
the things Pidgin does, or using some GTK+ hackery, it might be better
to have abstractions such as:

    * Create the conversation history area
    * Create the input area
    * Create the userlist area
    * Create the chat topic area
    * Pack all these widgets

and allowing plugins to override any number of these operations, without
having to duplicate the ones it doesn't want to change. The required
change in the code should not be huge, I think, but I am not sure if we
can do that without breaking API/ABI ... someone should write a patch!

Sadrul