Customizing Gaim Chat Windows

Gaim is an excellent instant messaging client with support for multiple protocols and runs on several different platforms. For the longest time I've wanted to customize the background color of my chat windows so they resemble my xterm settings of green text on a black background. There doesn't seem to be an easy way to do this via Gaim's preferences and after a little digging I finally got it working.

The most recent version of Gaim uses GTK+ 2.0 and the background color for chat windows can be customized by adding some styles to your ~/.gaim/gtkrc-2.0 file. You can also customize key bindings, fonts, and other widgets in Gaim by tweaking this file but I'm just going to discuss the settings for the chat windows in this post. I'm no GTK+ guru but I found the API docs and this mini-FAQ helpful and gave a nice introduction to styles and themes in GTK+.

To customize the colors in your chat windows edit your ~/.gaim/gtkrc-2.0 file or create if it doesn't exist and add the following lines:

style "gaim-dark" {
    base[NORMAL]="#000000"
    text[NORMAL]="#00FF00"
    GtkIMHtml::hyperlink-color="#007FFF"
    GtkWidget::cursor-color="#60AFFE"
    GtkWidget::secondary-cursor-color="#A4D3EE"
}
widget "*gaim_gtkconv_imhtml" style "gaim-dark"
widget "*gaim_gtkconv_entry" style "gaim-dark"

base[NORMAL] sets the background color and text[NORMAL] sets the color of the text. You can tweak the colors to your liking restart Gaim and your chat windows should now be customized. I didn't find a way to change the color of the screen names displayed in the chat window. Digging through the source code it looks like these colors are hardcoded using #define SEND_COLOR "#204a87" and #define RECV_COLOR "#cc0000" around line number 86 inside the file ./gtk/gtkconv.c of the Gaim source. You could always try changing these values and re-compiling Gaim. I haven't tested this but seems like it should work. Here's a screen shot of my customized chat window:

There is also a plugin which comes with Gaim called Gaim GTK+ Theme Control which seems to provide a GUI interface for editing your ~/.gaim/gtkrc-2.0 file but I didn't see any options for customizing the chat windows. In the Gaim FAQ there is also a link to a sample gtkrc-2.0 which gives some good examples of other customizations.