I recently (like a week ago) decided to finally upgrade my ancient Trillian install because it had many problems that needed addressing (OTR problems, no plugins for some networks, etc).

I decided to test out the new Trillian (Astra), which I had been waiting to be released for over 3 years. While I was very impressed with it as it is much cleaner, better designed, has a better assortment of options, and seems much more stable than either the previous Trillian or the current version of Pidgin, I still decided not to go with it. I was very unhappy with the fact that it forced you to create an account with them and sign in to it on startup, connecting to their servers for the full time you are using their product. This makes me not want to trust their product, as doing stuff like this can show a trend that generally leads to worse things. They even openly admit to bouncing your IM messages off their servers for different [legitimate] reasons.

So I went with Pidgin instead, and am generally pleased with it. It does most everything I want, and well enough. I was able to configure it and find plugins to do most everything I needed, but there was one major thing missing. Trillian had a script host plugin that allowed executing actions triggered from events. I was very surprised that Pidgin did not have a similar plugin. I contemplated making my own fully fledged one, as it would be a great and useful project to many, but I just don’t think I have the time right now :-\.

This is why I went ahead and made my Status Hot Keys plugin; as it isn’t quite as full fledged and useful as a full scripting host for the community, but it does what I want well enough to fill in my remaining requirements from Pidgin.