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.