Best Chat Client - Open Source and lightweight - Miranda IM

I have been using Miranda IM since 6 to 8 months or so. It is the best open source chat IM client. Its very light weight and supports many facilities.

It supports AIM, IRC, MSN, Yahoo, Jabber (XMPP protocol means gmail will work and any local LAN chat also works).

Basic architecture is plug in based. You can add different kinds of plug ins as per your needs.I will show here which plug ins you must have after installing it so it looks good and gives some good functions.

The most basic plug in is 'send/receive messages' which is in built and supports simple sending and receiving of messages. All protocol plug ins are also provided with the setup.You need to find more plug ins from add ons from Miranda site.

TabSRMM
This is very good plugin.
It supports

• tabbed message windows for multiple IMs.
• Log/history view of previous chat in the IM.
• Send message to multiple users at once.
  
• And many other cool things which are not in srmm.

This plug ins is very advanced version of SRMM you can say.I am suggesting this one only because with this, you can use it like any other. You can also find smilyadd plug in to add basic smilies to your chat. But this one is most needed.

History++ (History plus plus)
This is very advanced version of basic log viewer for all previous chat.
Basic log viewer shows all chat in listbox view. Means you need to select particular datetime to see the chat.

History++ will show you whole chat done for particular contact to till date in one view all text! isn't it great?You can also search in that log view.See the image below.

I will provide more good plug ins which may be of interest because of their usefulness. I generally avoid skinny things used for UI changes only :)

Please provide if you also find some new plug ins for it as i am not doing it now. This is what i am using and must have once.

so please leave comments and give your favorite plug ins.

Addons site for Miranda