Purple, Pidgin and Finch

See AUTHORS and COPYRIGHT for the list of contributors.

libpurple is a library intended to be used by programmers seeking to write an IM client that connects to many IM networks. It comes with support for Bonjour, IRC, XMPP, among others, and there are many more networks supported via third party protocols.

Pidgin is a graphical IM client written in C which uses the GTK+ toolkit.

Finch is a text-based IM client written in C which uses the ncurses toolkit.

These programs are not endorsed by, nor affiliated with, any proprietary instant messaging company in any way.

BUILD

Pidgin uses meson as a build system.

You can quickly build Pidgin with the following commands

meson build
cd build
ninja
ninja install

There are quite a few options for the build that you can view by looking at meson_options.txt. You can specify the options when running meson like the following:

meson -Ddebug=true build

If you've already ran meson you can use meson configure

cd build
meson configure -Ddebug=true

RUN

Currently Pidgin can not be run from a build directory which means you must install it first. Once you've done that, you only need to run 'pidgin' or 'finch'. If it fails to launch you may need to run ldconfig as root.

To get started, simply add a new account.

If you come across a bug, please report it at: https://developer.pidgin.im/

PLUGINS

If you do not wish to enable the plugin support within Purple, run meson with -Dplugins=false or if you've already ran meson use meson configure -Dplugins=false from the build directory. This will prevent the ability to load plugins.

ninja install puts the plugins in $PREFIX/lib/purple (PREFIX being what you specified when you ran meson. It defaults to /usr/local). Purple looks for the plugins in that directory by default. Plugins can be installed per-user in ~/.purple/plugins as well. Pidgin and Finch also look in $PREFIX/lib/pidgin and $PREFIX/lib/finch for UI-specific, respectively.

Developing

There is a ton of information on developing Pidgin available at developer.pidgin.im.

To generate the documentation locally you can pass -Ddoc=true to meson or meson configure which will build the gtk-docs for everything.