Recently I've been getting sick of connecting to so many accounts on so many different clients. It's troublesome to maintain so many accounts/programs.

I liked using Trillian for a while but it took too much processor memory and it can't connect to Skype or Googletalk (which I haven't downloaded, but will do so when I find a suitable Adiumlike program).

Does anyone know of an IM client which supports all the major IM protocols? That would be MSN, Yahoo, AIM, Jabber/Google (well, Skype too but I guess it's optional).

I've looked around the place, so far, Psi and Gaim look good. But can Psi connect to the abovementioned IM networks?

Of course I'm going to miss the irritating winks and emoticons with which I use to annoy people and oh yes, the nudges. Love those. But for the sake of convenience...

So what programs do you recommend? Would love to hear them! Oh and why you recommend them, of course (beginning to sound like an essay question ).

Well, being that I'm getting kinda sick of Trillian too, I decided to take a look around sourceforge and see what I could come up with. And I did find two programs that look like they may fit our need.

Eclipse Plugin

And

Kopete

I checked out both and it appears that neither mentioned Skype, but Kopete seems to include all of the other protocols that you mentioned you were interested in.

I have not used either, I'm thinking of giving Kopete a try, so I can't really reccomend either one for any specific reasons. I was poking around to see what I could find, and thought you might be interested.

Ooh. Awesome. Thanks for the tips. Will try them out and see how it goes!

Hey dodger did you ever try either of those. I'm curious as to weather they are good or not, but too lazy to try myself.

trillian does work with google talk. pay a visit to bigblueball.com and check their forums. there is a set of small instructions to make it work with trillian. enjoy.

Actually... No, 'coz I've been lazy too!! Perhaps I'll cancel my yahoo and aim accounts and just stick to msn, skype and googletalk. I haven't quite decided.

Hmm, how can I word this post to give some answers but encourage all of you to go out and find out some answers for yourself! Well, how about this, I used trillian for a long time before google talk came along and I needed to connect to jabber. Of course, trillian doesn't allow jabber in the free version so I started looking around and gaim was my first find:

click here for gaim

I quickly forgot about trillian. The only thing that I miss is the option for multiple users, but with multiple user accounts on a winXP computer it shouldn't be too much of an issue. The other bonus is that, for some reason, proxied IRC connections actually work for me in gaim but I could never get them to work in trillian. Of course now I'm moving to mIRC for IRC, but that's a different story.

As for the smilies issue, well, I think I will let you discover that answer for yourself.

Use Gaim or pidigin, same thing, Gaim is just the old name. Been using it since Aim first went to version 7 -> (pre triton s**t)

-Relic

Pidgin
Is There An Adium-like Im Client For Windows?

Pidgin what used to be the old Gaim, a windows based version of the linux version has completely remodeled itself to act and look just like adium. It supports all the following communication networks

AIM
Bonjour
Gadu-Gadu
Google Talk
Groupwise
ICQ
IRC
MSN
MySpaceIM
QQ
SILC
SIMPLE
Sametime
XMPP
Yahoo!
Zephyr

Pidgin.com

-reply by Bret