Pidgin user thinking to migrate

[Zevel]

Hello,

I am a long-time Pidgin user considering moving to Miranda-NG.

I would like to hear from people that used both about the strong and weak points of each and the differences between them.

Some things I like about Pidgin:
* I can have buddies on multiple protocols and Pidgin will seamlessly switch to the one they are active on, in the same conversation and with shared history.
* I can easily synchronize the local chat history between computers (for example, when travelling with laptop) since the it is saved as HTML files,
* I can easily edit and synchronize the buddy list, chat-room aliases, and other settings (due to the configuration files being XML).  I wrote a Python script to parse the debug into and generate a Discord server/channel list since many Discord servers I'm on frequently change their channels.
* Has plug-ins for all the protocols I use, including Telegram and F-chat (which seem to be missing from Miranda).

Can I achieve those with Miranda?

Some things I dislike about Pidgin:
* Windows support is not very good.
* User support, especially for Windows users, is not very good.
* Has some weird bugs, which won't get fixed because development effort goes to version 3 which will take a while to be ready.
* Cannot pull server-side chat history for many (all?) protocols, probably due to the local chat history being saved as HTML (see above).
* The source code is not something I can play with, even if I wanted to.

Your comments are appreciated!

[dartraiden]

I can have buddies on multiple protocols and Pidgin will seamlessly switch to the one they are active on, in the same conversation and with shared history.

Miranda supports metacontacts.

I can easily synchronize the local chat history between computers (for example, when travelling with laptop) since the it is saved as HTML files

Place Miranda database to Dropbox, OneDrive, etc

I can easily edit and synchronize the buddy list, chat-room aliases, and other settings (due to the configuration files being XML).  I wrote a Python script to parse the debug into and generate a Discord server/channel list since many Discord servers I'm on frequently change their channels.

DbEditor plugin. There are no third party tools to edit the current format (MDBX). In the future, we are going to switch to SQLite.

Has plug-ins for all the protocols I use, including Telegram and F-chat (which seem to be missing from Miranda).

All supported protocols are listed on https://www.miranda-ng.org

* Windows support is not very good.
* User support, especially for Windows users, is not very good.

Miranda is Windows-only app, so Windows support is perfect.

Has some weird bugs, which won't get fixed because development effort goes to version 3 which will take a while to be ready.

Miranda currently has 1-2 developers and 388 opened bugs.

Cannot pull server-side chat history for many (all?) protocols, probably due to the local chat history being saved as HTML (see above).

Some our protocols (ICQ, XMPP) already has server-side chat history support. Facebook is coming.

The source code is not something I can play with, even if I wanted to.

Pull requests are welcome

[ghazan]

* I can have buddies on multiple protocols and Pidgin will seamlessly switch to the one they are active on, in the same conversation and with shared history.

Yes, in Miranda they are called "meta-contacts", you can gather as many sub-contacts from any protocols into one metacontact with common history.

* I can easily synchronize the local chat history between computers (for example, when travelling with laptop) since the it is saved as HTML files

Miranda is completely portable, you can sync the only .dat file that contains all settings, contacts & messages.

* I can easily edit and synchronize the buddy list, chat-room aliases, and other settings (due to the configuration files being XML).  I wrote a Python script to parse the debug into and generate a Discord server/channel list since many Discord servers I'm on frequently change their channels.

in Miranda you need to study Lua to write scripts :-)

* Has plug-ins for all the protocols I use, including Telegram and F-chat (which seem to be missing from Miranda).

We have 24 protocols, but don't have Telegram, you can use XMPP transports to read/write messages

* Windows support is not very good.

Miranda is a native Windows application (no Qt stuff etc).

* Has some weird bugs, which won't get fixed because development effort goes to version 3 which will take a while to be ready.

Any application has bugs, but we actively fight them

* Cannot pull server-side chat history for many (all?) protocols, probably due to the local chat history being saved as HTML (see above).

Miranda provides full server-side support for any protocol that supports it.

* The source code is not something I can play with, even if I wanted to.

Miranda has 100% opened source code, but you don't have to play with it, people usually prefer the binary distribution via Plugin Updater.