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Comment by rkagerer | Hacker News Reader

This is such a real shame. I miss ICQ; the original had features I really liked which I haven't found in dumbed-down, modern chat software. Examples:

- status and visibility could be controlled for each contact at a granular level

- locally-stored, fully searchable chat history that gave results in a sensible manner and which you could migrate to new computers

- notification intrusiveness (ding, flash, etc) could be adjusted with one or two clicks

- dense UI (less whitespace meant more information packed into a smaller window that took up less of my screen)

- hitting X actually exited the program

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> - dense UI (less whitespace meant more information packed into a smaller window that took up less of my screen)

Yesterday's thread about DECUS and HP's OpenVMS hobbyist program opened a can of nostalgia worms so I remembered that my first laptop was a late-Digital era 11"-screen laptop with a pretty low-res screen (800x600, I think?).

I used ICQ on it and its interface was about as awkward as Skype's is today -- except today I'm running Skype on a laptop with about twice the screen estate. It's a little silly that all that research work in the industry -- and all that money I've paid -- went into screens that I now use just to display more whitespace.

I know it's supposed to help with touch screens but a) my laptop -- like most laptops currently in use -- doesn't have one and b) this isn't 1997 anymore, UI toolkits today make it trivial to adjust element sizes and paddings so that they're appropriate to whatever pointing device is currently in use.

Which version of ICQ are you referring to? I was running ICQ on a 640x480 monitor back then and i remember it having a very compact window[0] which i always had it visible.

[0] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DjOHmkFVAAUPzx6.jpg

It's been so long I really can't recall anymore. (Edit: but just like you, I do remember that I had the ICQ window visible at pretty much all times, and I could comfortably fit an Emacs window, the contact window a chat window on my desktop's 1024x768 screen.)

That being said, the window in that screenshot is about 200 x 320 px. It would have taken about a third of the horizontal space of the screen, and about 2/3rds of the vertical space of a 640x480 screen. It was certainly usable -- way, way more usable than Skype on a full HD monitor today -- but lots of stuff was claustrophobic in 640x480.

(Then again, most modern apps are practically unusable if you resize their window to 640x480...)

Sadly Skype and similar programs tend to take more physical space on my monitor than ICQ (and MSN Messenger, especially the original versions like the one included in Windows XP) ever did :-/

The latest version of ICQ was huge (think Windows XP skin), at this point I started using the QIP alternative client which was even more compact than the first version of the original client. When everybody started using Miranda, Pidgin file transfer pretty much broke due to client incompatibility. That was a sad moment, they had a nice product but stopped listening to the users.

Pidgin[0][1] supports a great deal of protocols and there is "End-to-end encryption, through Off-the-Record Messaging (OTR)" plugin you can install that can be used for just about everything it supports. If ICQ NEW still supports OSCAR it can probably used out of the box, there is also a plugin[2] for the newer WIM protocol.

[0] https://www.pidgin.im/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin_(software)

[2] https://github.com/EionRobb/icyque

Pidgin feels like it's dated by now, doesn't support much, does it even support Matrix (out of the box)? I think it still lists some dead protocols last I looked at it too.

pidgin doesn’t support matrix out of the box; we did write a prpl a few years ago but it needs a maintainer to make it properly fit for purpose: https://github.com/matrix-org/purple-matrix

I still use Trillian just for the UI. I can have several chat windows open along the top of my screen without taking up much of my working space. Since I work remotely from most of my colleagues this is priceless and I don't know what I'll do when I am forced to switch. I was also a heavy ICQ user from the 90's into the early 2000's for all the reasons you cited.

Does Trillian support slack by any chance?

Pasting this reply I found elsewhere. Should be accurate to my knowledge.

Yes to Slack! Ask whoever manages your organization to enable XMPP or IRC gateway connection, then add the appropriate type of account to Trillian. You won't have access to rich cards or shared files from within Trillian, but you will be able to read and send messages to channels and individuals.

At one point ICQ had real time chat — you saw the keys the other person pressed as they typed.

Yes! I remember how incredible it was to actually see my friend typing in the same window as me way before Google docs. I miss that.

They also had floating contacts that was a lot like those chat heads some apps have now.

> - hitting X actually exited the program

How is that good UX for a chat app?

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