Granted I do not use Pidgin any more, I agree with this statement. If you notice this blog post was created in 2008. The fact this page gets as many hits as it does 4 years later, and has as many comments as it does about users trying to get themes to work is concerning.

Good luck!

Whats even funnier is that they even have a a themes tab in their prefrences that says “new themes can be installed by dragging and dropping them onto the theme list.”

Yeah that totally works. lol not.

Great work getting it to work guys, but lets focus on having an interface that doesn’t look like its from 1998.

Well, at least the theme can be changed. Hopefully this gets fixed sometime, but once you know how to do this I don’t think it’s that much of an issue anymore. Won’t take more than a minute to change a theme in the future. But this method should be included in the program’s documentation as long as it’s the only way to change a theme in Windows.

Needless to say, this is a big pain in the *ss! I hope pidgin developers work around this mess soon!

Thank you for the solution mates!

Do all of this with Pidgin closed. Once done, startup Pidgin and the theme should be in place.

I go here: C:\Program Files\Pidgin\Gtk\etc\gtk-2.0\
which gets me into the directory where I can see the gtkrc file. It’s not a file with an extension, so Windows doesn’t quite get what the heck to do with it if you double-click. So I right clicked on it and opened it with Notepad++ (You may only need Notepad, but if you need a better editing tool get NP++ here: http://notepad-plus-plus.org/download)

Then you simply change the theme by manually typing in the theme you want to use (mine had “MS-Windows”, and I changed it to the new theme folder I dropped into the Pidgin folder in Windows). If you’re on Windows 7 (or perhaps Vista as well), you’ll have to save the gtkrc file into your Documents directory. Then just copy the file, navigate in Windows Explorer back to the gtk-2.0 directory, and paste the modified gtkrc file.

I put the themes I have downloaded into the share\themes\

I have tried clicking re-read gtkrc files, i have tried restarting the program, but still the themes do not show up in the themes tab under preferences. What am I doing wrong? why isn’t this working? Even pidgin’s own site is useless in this regard. I’ve used several im programs before and I’ve never come across one so completely aggravating to customize to my likeing. unfortunatel I am stuck with it since msn’s latest “upgrade” is a major “downgrade” where security is concerend and I can no longer use the previous version as it’s forcing me to upgrade if I want to use the program.

Slowie, what can you edit to fix this? Your explanation isn’t very clear on what exactly to do. Could you possibly explain it step by step in detail and not be a little less elusive? If it works then i’d like to try it. Anything is better than the rather plain and bland look of the default settings. Any idea why the Theme tab in pidgin preferences no longer works properly? I applied a smiley them and it applied properly without issue. Haven’t tried sound themes or icon themes yet, but the bussy list theme sure is giving me trouble.