Group windows by account type

[Jo-Erlend Schinstad]

Hello everyone. I'm a new user on this list and joined mostly in order
to ask a question, or rather to make a suggestion.

I've been testing Pidgin as an IRC client in Ubuntu Jaunty beta. To
say I've been sceptical of Pidgin as an IRC client, would be a major
understatement. I've been using xchat, but I would like to like using
Pidgin as an IRC client, because that would be yet another application
I don't have to install in Ubuntu, but which is just there. So, I
decided to open my mind and give it some serious testing.

I discovered that Pidgin as an IRC client really Rocks and Sucks; I've
never seen an IRC client that uses IRC WATCH more appropriately than
Pidgin. It really makes IRC feel more like IM, which could be good in
certain cases. Also, I really love the fact that when a channel
message contains my nickname, the new notification system is used to
display that message. It makes it possible to ask a question on IRC,
then close the windows and forget about it, then when someone replies,
you'll be notified. Beautiful!

 There are some things that has to be changed or fixed in order for
Pidgin to be a good IRC client though. For one thing, notices _must
not_ be opened in their own windows. Notices are not usually very
important and the default behaviour in all other clients, is to not
open them in new windows. Also, there is a side effect; all ctcp
replies are notices and therefore also open their own windows. This
must be changed. Actually for IRC account types, numeric messages and
notices should be sent to one dedicated window, and I think this
window should have the same name as the account in question.

Speaking of windows. It should be made possible to group windows based
on account _types_ and not only by accounts or groups. This way, I
could have all my IRC channels, which are on several different
networks, grouped together in a window. I realise that I can
accomplish this by grouping the IRC channels together and open new
conversations in windows based on groups. However, this makes it
difficult to see which networks the different channels are on, making
it easy to /join #channel on the WrongNet. That, of course, could be
worked around by giving all channels an alias, like #Ubuntu at FreeNode.
But this feels awkward and requires quite a bit of configuration. In
any case, being able to group windows based on the account type is a
usable feature. I hope this will be implemented.

And of course, we need to have a way to see and set channel modes,
kick, ban, op and voice users, set topic, etc. Pidgin does have this
for XMPP Rooms, doesn't it?

I think these changes should be fairly easy to implement, but they
would make Pidgin a really suitable IRC client for a lot of people.

Thank you for your attention,

Jo-Erlend Schinstad