So if you read earlier in my posts you would have realized how sweet and versatile Pidgin is. Well I have discovered yet another nifty trick for Pidgin – running multiple instances of the program (with different profiles). I have found this useful simply because I have been in environments where it has its own messaging system but blocks all the ports to the to “outside” IM servers, so maybe you use a proxy server noted in the earlier post about PuTTY to get to the outside IM servers and then run a normally connected instance for the local messaging server.
For Windows:
- go to start-run, and enter “cmd” – this will open the command windows
- in the command windows browse to “c:\program files\pidgin”
- now enter in the command window “set PIDGIN_MULTI_INST=1″
- create a second profile by entering this into the command window “pidgin -mc <path of where you want to keep that new profile>”
- another instance of pidgin is opened with its own profile settings
- enjoy your two instances of pidgin
