Bring Pidgin’s window into front focus when there’s an inbound IM

I was talking to a co-worker about Pidgin not coming into focus when there’s a new, inbound IM. The Pidgin window used to come into focus, front and center, when I was running Ubuntu/Gnome and when running OpenSUSE/KDE, but when I upgraded my office desktop to Ubuntu/Unity it stopped behaving this way. My co-worker noticed the same behavior with Fedora17/Gnome. A new IM would come in, but the Pidgin IM window would remain in the background, hidden, unseen and unread.

I thought “There has to be a setting that controls this,” and there is…

  • Bring up Pidgin’s Buddy List
  • Click Tools > Plugins
  • Locate the Message Notification plugin and highlight it
  • At the bottom of the Plugins window is a Configure Plugin button. Click it
  • Under Notification Methods check both Raise conversation window and Present conversation window
  • Click Close

That’s it. The next time someone IM’s you, your Pidgin Conversation will pop up in the center of your screen, in front of all of your other windows.

Hope you find this useful.

4 thoughts on “Bring Pidgin’s window into front focus when there’s an inbound IM

  1. This does not work all the time. If another application is not in focus pidgin window will popup in front but if the other application has focus the pidgin window will go behind the application. For example if you are reading an email in thunderbird application by clicking on an email i.e. thunderbird has focus, the new pidgin window will go behind. But if you remove focus from thunderbird by clicking somewhere outside of thunderbird then pidgin window will popup in front. This pidgin/unity issue is driving us nuts as we are miss IM messages as we never see it. We are planning to move away from pidgin if this bug continues.

  2. Same issue. Is there a solution for this problem? I have read pages and pages of post without finding a solution which works for Windows 7.
    Because of this pidgin issue I have missed very important IM messages or saw them too late.
    What can I use in replacement of Pidgin if this cannot be fixed?

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