> you could keep your chat logs forever

Or delete them!

I used Miranda. Beautiful app with lots of plugins, and lot of settings and themes to customize it for yourself.

I remember I had a plugin that let you change your profile picture each <x> time. And I seem to recall with ubuntu's notify-osd you could reply to your incoming messages from within the notification itself. I loved using Pidgin.

"Modern" mainstream IM is completely misserable. I hate having to use one-app-per-each-protocol for the sake of "security" and "features".

Pidgin is still being maintained/developed, one of the devs actively streams on twitch too IIRC.