Get the Most out of Adium

Adium is a free instant messaging application for Mac OS X that can connect to AIM, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo, and more.

Most of Mac users have known the existence of this instant messaging client. And today, I would like to reveal some of the nifty tricks while using Adium to get the most out of Adium, such as inserting line break, changing nickname, updating Twitter with Adium, and many others.

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Switch Between Tabs

When chatting with many of your friends, this will be definitely the case: our hands will be too lazy to reach the mouse and click on the tab. That's when switching tabs using keyboard shortcut will come in handy.

• Command-← or Command-→ to move to previous or next tab
• Command-1, Command-2, … , Command-0 to move to the n-th tab

These shortcuts can also be seen under Adium Menubar: Window.

Apply New Theme

Seeing old theme would surely someday make you feel bored. It will be better if you've wider range of choices. You can find some gorgeous themes at AdiumXtras Message Styles.

Ravenant by Collin Henderson is my favorite until now (shown above).

Other themes/message styles that are worth looking:

1. Modern by Joshua Bryant
2. ProtoScroll by Eoban Binder
3. Ethereal by Adam Henson
4. Blackened by Andreas Lanjerud
5. Candywrapper by Therealloon
6. Simply Smooth by Aqueous
7. Succinct by David ZKL
8. PurePlastics by Peter Simonsson

Which one is your favorite theme?

Insert Line Break

Unlike typing with text editor, message will be sent upon hitting the Return key. Usually, some Adium users will advice you to use keystrokes Option-Return.

However, it's quite troublesome if we often use line break for our message. Therefore, we need a bit of workaround for this, which is done by assigning enter key (the one next to the right-hand Command key) to produce a line break.

Here is how to do it.

1. Open Adium Menubar: Adium → Preferences…
2. Go to General section
3. Look for the option box labelled "Send messages with"
4. Change the assigned key to Return key only

Change Nickname

By default, the nickname of your Adium will follow your username. If you want to change it, you can go under Adium Preferences → Personal Section.

Just recently, I found a much faster way:

1. Open your Adium Contact List (Command-/)
2. Double-click on your nickname and you will see it's now highlighted
3. Type in your new nickname and hit Return key to confirm

Show Unread Message Count

When chatting with many of your friends, it will be really helpful to display unread message count of every tabs.

Follow these steps to achieve that.

1. Open Adium Preferences (huh, again?)
2. Go under Advanced Section and choose categories (from sidebar) Messages
3. Inside you can change many settings including the checkbox
   Show unread message count in tabs

Killer Plugins

With easy-to-install additional plugins, you will even fill your Mac day with Adium-ing. Clicking on the title will bring you to the download page.

Contact Album

Developer: Dustin Brewer

This plugins, after the installation, will store all icons that your contacts use over time and comes with a viewer for the icons.

Adium Time Zone

Developer: Jürgen Kreileder

This plugin adds time zone functionality to Adium by letting you specify a time zone for each contact. You will then be able to see their local time in the tooltip when you hover over them.

TwitterIM

Developer: Patrick Gibson

Only works on Adium 1.3.4.

TwitterIM allows users to send and receive Tweets in a normal Adium IM window. While waiting for the release of Twitter integration with Adium in the later version of Adium 1.4, why don't we use this plugin first?

To set up TwitterIM, just go to Adium Menubar: File → Add Account → microblog-Twitter and fill in your Twitter account information. If you can't find microblog-Twitter, it means that you have used the incompatible version of Adium.

Connect to Facebook

If you've a Facebook account, it's so advisable for you to chat with your Facebook friends using Adium (Yes, Adium also supports chatting with Facebook account. Cool!).

The setting up is so easy: Go to Adium Menubar: File → Add Account → Facebook and fill in your Facebook login information.

Other Settings

Those settings mentioned above are often changed. But of course, to suit your taste and convenience, there are more preferences and settings that can be changed inside Adium Preferences.

Some settings that may be of your interest:

1. Change the number of recent messages in new tab → General Section
2. Set timeout for inactivity time to change status accordingly → Status Section
3. Add/remove actions for certain event → Events Section
4. Enable automatic receival of file transfer → File Transfer Section
5. Open chats as soon as contacts begin typing → Advanced Section · Messages

Lastly

There is a chance that we will miss some interesting tricks here. If you've got any killer tricks regarding to Adium, you can share it on the comment box provided, we really appreciate it.