Be careful what you wish for. Pidgin is amazing in a lot of ways; it supports a lot of protocols, has simple plugins, a solid communications library, etc. But it also has the breathtaking hostility to usability of so many open source apps. A lot of the GUI details aren’t quite right and the docs are downright arrogant.

To be fair, Pidgin mostly works fine out of the box. Except the font is too small. No big deal, every app lets you configure the font, right? Ha! Just try the documented solution. Apparently I’m supposed to learn about GTK, and themes, and figure out where GTK places config files in Windows, then edit them with a text editor and insert 500 bytes of configuration directives for “imhtml-fix”.

There’s a proposal to add font controls in Pidgin, but the answer from the developer is “I think more people should know how to modify their system configuration settings”. Because you know, chatting with your friends without squinting should require you spend hours researching some GUI toolkit no other app on your system uses.