Design Guidelines

Applicability

These guidelines are informal descriptions of the sort of thinking that goes into the design of Pidgin, libpurple, and family. These are not hard-and-fast rules, but they are conscious decisions made by the Pidgin developers which will be violated only after careful consideration. (Or by mistake, and corrected shortly thereafter!)

Uniformity

While Pidgin is a multiprotocol IM client, the goal is to hide protocols from the user as much as possible. Obviously users have to know about individual protocols when they create or modify accounts, but in day-to-day communication and usage, the intent is that users don't have to think about protocols at all. The workflow in Pidgin is intended to be "I would like to chat with Sean about wibbles", not "I would like to create an XMPP conversation with seanegan@…". The focus is on the goal, not the process. In reaching toward this focus, we have chosen to paper over the differences between the various protocols and features as much as possible (without crippling or needlessly complicating things). This has lead to decisions such as the removal of protocol icons from the buddy list and contact-aware chats and logs.