# Purple, Pidgin and Finch See AUTHORS and COPYRIGHT for the list of contributors. libpurple is a library intended to be used by programmers seeking to write an IM client that connects to many IM networks. It supports AIM, ICQ, and XMPP, among others. Pidgin is a graphical IM client written in C which uses the GTK+ toolkit. Finch is a text-based IM client written in C which uses the ncurses toolkit. These programs are not endorsed by, nor affiliated with, AOL nor any other company in any way. ## BUILD Pidgin uses [meson](https://mesonbuild.com) as a build system. You can quickly build Pidgin with the following commands meson build cd build ninja sudo ninja install There are quite a few options for the build that you can view by looking at `meson_options.txt`. You can specify the options when running meson like the following: meson -Ddebug=true build If you've already ran meson you can use `meson configure` cd build meson configure -Ddebug=true ## RUN Currently Pidgin can not be run from a build directory which means you must install it first. Once you've done that, you only need to run 'pidgin' or 'finch'. To get started, simply add a new account. If you come across a bug, please report it at: https://developer.pidgin.im/ ## PLUGINS If you do not wish to enable the plugin support within Purple, run meson with `-Dplugins=false` or if you've already ran meson use `meson configure -Dplugins=false` from the build directory. This will prevent the ability to load plugins. `ninja install` puts the plugins in `$PREFIX/lib/purple` (PREFIX being what you specified when you ran meson. It defaults to `/usr/local`). Purple looks for the plugins in that directory by default. Plugins can be installed per-user in `~/.purple/plugins` as well. Pidgin and Finch also look in `$PREFIX/lib/pidgin` and `$PREFIX/lib/finch` for UI-specific, respectively. ## Developing There is a ton of information on developing Pidgin available at [developer.pidgin.im](https://developer.pidgin.im). To generate the documentation locally you can pass `-Ddoc=true` to `meson` or `meson configure` which will build the `gtk-docs` for everything.