Pidgin comes with some phenomenal plugins by default (see psychic mode). But there were still a couple other things I wanted to have available to me. The main thing I wanted was the buddy list to be visible but without having the “Pidgin” taskbar entry. I did a quick search and came across Pidgin Extended Preferences. It allows you to turn off the taskbar entry for pidgin so you have more room for programs you actually need. I did a couple other searches at sourceforge and found a neat current track plugin and music info plugin that seem pretty useful/useless but cool.

Let me know in the comments if you know of some other great third party plugins that you use in pidgin.

*BTW* Turns out the current track plugin doesn’t work under Vista Ultimate x86. I am going to look into this a bit more.

It doesn’t look like the plugin is working under Windows XP also. That is OK though. The author of that plugin had a link to MisicInfo plugin which does a similar thing but doesn’t support as many players.  I got it working with Winamp 5.5 under Vista without a problem.  Enjoy!