Order contacts by status (not group)

[Etan Reisner]

On Sun, Mar 16, 2008 at 10:26:41PM -0300, Pablo Fernández wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm running Pidgin 2.4.0 on Windows XP Sp2 and I'd like to know if it's
> possible to display the contacts in my buddy list ordered by status
> (Online/Offline) instead of the group they belong to.

Note that you are using pidgin, we'll see why that's important in a minute.

> The problem with the default group-ordering is that I have dozens of
> different groups (and they aren't even the same across different IM
> networks), so they take up a lot of space. Apart from that, I'm just very
> used to the Online/Offline grouping I've always had in WLM.

If you don't want the separate groups (across different protocols) then
rename them so they have the same name, pidgin will show all buddies in
groups with the same name (regardless of account) in the same buddy list
group.

> In Finch's release notes (http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/ChangeLog) they
> say "The 'Grouping' plugin can be used for alternate grouping in the
> buddylist. The current options are 'Group Online/Offline' and 'No Group'."
> but I have no idea whatsoever how to enable it. I thought I'd have to look
> in the plugins menu (Tools/Plugins) but there didn't seem to be anything
> named "Grouping" there, so I'm now clueless.

Note that this is the changelog for finch, not pidgin as you indicated you
were using and as we noted earlier. This feature does not exist for
pidgin, only finch.

> Hope you can help me with this.
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Pablo

You can sort by status within each group, Buddies->Sort Buddies->By Status
and Buddies->Show->Offline Buddies, if that will do what you want. Is
there a particular reason you need to see offline buddies all the time and
want them separated like that? If you really don't use your group names
then you can just move everyone into the same group manually and then the
sort by status code will do something approximating what you want.

Are you aware of contacts in pidgin? Right-click->Expand someone and then
drag other buddies for that same person in and you will see only a single
entry for all of that person's buddies.

    -Etan