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Configuration Tips


These are largely my own personal notes on how to configure the GUI to be less annoying, less bloated and first of all more responsive. I just made them public in case anyone else happened to share my opinion on settings.


Pidgin 2.x

  • To make Enter do a new line and Ctrl-Enter send, locate or create the file:

    C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\.purple\gtkrc-2.0

    binding "my-bindings" {     bind "Return" { "insert-at-cursor" ("\n") }     bind "<ctrl>Return" { "message_send" () } } widget "*pidgin_conv_entry" binding "my-bindings" gtk-can-change-accels = 1
  • To make Esc close the conversation window, add this line to the following file:

    C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\.purple\accels

    (gtk_accel_path "<main>/Conversation/Close" "Escape")
  • To get the brilliant TrillianPro smiley theme download this and uncompress it to:

    Pidgin\pixmaps\pidgin\emotes\

  • If it annoys you that Pidgin does not show enough backlog inside each conversation window, this plugin helps a lot.

Mozilla

  • Not happy with QuickTime aggressively taking over various filetypes in your browser? Go to the url about:config and search for "quick" and set plugin.scan.Quicktime to 100.0 (this only works sometimes)

UTF-8 in irssi/screen/putty

  • In the Putty configuration go to Window -> Translation and choose "UTF-8" in the dropdown.
  • Under "Window" -> "Appearance" choose a font that supports the desired language.
    Example: "MS Gothic" works for japanese. It might be necessary to install the corresponding language pack to even get these fonts, and it will not work without the proper fonts.
  • Make sure you start up screen with the -U parameter (also necessary when re-attaching to an existing screen.)
    screen -U irssi
  • In irssi give the following commands:
    /set term_charset UTF-8 /set term_recode OFF
  • After setting all the above, you might have to quit and restart irssi.

UTF-8 in MySQL under FreeBSD

Make sure you do this before anyone starts using the database.
Add or edit the file "/var/db/mysql/my.cnf" so that you have this:
[mysqld] init_connect=’SET collation_connection = utf8_general_ci’ init_connect=’SET NAMES utf8’ default-character-set=utf8 character-set-server=utf8 collation-server=utf8_general_ci skip-character-set-client-handshake

EditPlus and PHP

In order to make EditPlus save files compatible with PHP while doing web pages in UTF-8 format, you have to disable the "byte order mark" that some UTF-8 text files have, because PHP doesn't understand these. Also you might as well always use "unix linefeeds" as the CR character is obsolete. (Notepad.exe is the only application that needs them)

editplus