I switched from pidgin to rtcomm because of difficulty finding a chat window in pidgin once it is minimised. You have to click the systray icon, then your whole desktop goes blank, then you have to press the home button to bring up the application list, then pick pidgin, then double-click the user in the buddy list to then bring back the conversation. Crazy stuff.

rtcomm, is good, but has one major bug. If you disable "auto away", then go online, sometimes it appears you are online, when infact you are marked as away. You can find this out by opening a chat window, and you will see next to your icon that you are actually away, even though your presence tray icon says you're online. Sometimes it quickly changes to online when you open the chat window, otherwise you have to select avaliable mode.

One other problem I have with rtcomm is that it does not give you the ability to notify when users come online or go offline. I thought of a solution to this - by running "dbus-monitor" in xterm, I can see that there are dbus messages for contacts changing status. So I could write a python script to check for these, and then display a notification and/or log status changes. Maybe even execute a command for certain special contacts. Pity I don't know python! But there are some nice examples of doing this with pidgin here: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/apps/pidgin-2-0.ars/4

Anyone want to tackle this?