Hi,

Now, with IRC + chat being basically umaintained, I'm thinking again about an idea we had quite some time ago - to create the "ultimate" message window plugin which offers an unified user interface for all chat sessions in Miranda.

To achieve this, we would need to merge parts of chat.dll into tabSRMM. This would have the following advantages:

• unified user interface - chatrooms like IRC channels and/or MSN group chats could co-exist with normal chat sessions within the same container. For MSN group chats, this should make it possible to "morph" a 1:1 chat session into a multichat when someone joins - no need to switch to a new window - the current tab will just change its behaviour from a single chat session to a multichat room
• it would save some code. Such a merged tabsrmm+chat would be more effective than two independent plugins (a single plugin with, say, 500k size is better than 2 separate plugins with 250k each).
• it would guarantee that the chat.dll part will be maintained in the future (as long as I work on tabSRMM). So bugs could be fixed, and a few new features could be added (personally, I think that chat.dll is fairly complete and does not need much new features - IEView support might be one of the more important ones).
• better usability - unified icons in all chat sessions, synchronized hotkeys, the same "look and feel" for both normal and multi chat sessions.
• the flexibility of the tabSRMM container system would, of course, allow you to organize your chat sessions better than you currently can - you could put IRC channels in a different container or even sort them by IRC network and so on.

Of course, everything comes at a cost. A +disadvantage+ would be that tabSRMM will grow by, at least, 200k in size. But like I already said, it is better to have a single plugin with a size of 500k than 2 plugins with 250k each - each plugin adds additional overhead (especially when miranda starts) and merging the 2 plugins may also eliminate some code and resources (icons etc.).

So, what do you think. Comments are welcome. This is currently only a mental eperiment :) No code has yet been written.