[HOWTO] Configuring and customizing Trillian Pro 3.1

I’m doing this post more for future reference for myself than anything else, but it might help those of you who use Trillian as your IM client. I’ve been using Trillian since version .6 and I registered my copy in August 2001, which makes me one of the first Trillian users to ever pay Scott Werndorfer money. 🙂 I’ve been a loyal every-single-day user since, and I’ve done a lot of things to customize the heck out of my install.

I started with Trillian Pro 3.1, which is the latest version. The default interface is (mostly) fine with me, but there are a few changes I always like to make. Here they are, listed in the order I performed them:

Get rid of ugly default emoticons
The default emoticons are hideous. Some people prefer to turn them off entirely, but I actually really like the latest MSN emoticons. To enable MSN emoticons, download the zip file listed in this thread and unzip it to [your Trillian install, like C:\Program Files\Trillian]\Stixe\Plugins directory. It will create a new MSN folder. Then go into Trillian preferences -> Skins -> Advanced and under Emoticons, pick the MSN set. (By the way, I found the animated wink creepy, so I found the non-animated version and saved it as \stixe\plugins\MSN\animated\wink_smile.gif. That took care of that.)

Get rid of “blobs” and use real icons next to people’s names
Due to trademark issues (or something like that), Trillian puts a colored “blob” next to the person’s name instead of the actual AIM/ICQ/etc. icons. I think this is ugly. Follow the instructions here to get rid of those blobs and get the real icons. (You’ll need to download the Customizer software linked in that thread to easily enable the icons, but it’s easy to download and works like a charm.)

Slightly more complicated: small toolbar icons as the default and making the chat windows bigger
I used this tweak to make the small toolbar icons appear as the default. Just download the main.xml file from that person’s post and put it in \stixe\interface\Default, then restart Trillian.

The chat boxes are too small for my biggish (1600×1024) monitor. I followed the instructions in this thread to make them larger. I set the default message input window size to 95 and set the type 2 boxes to be 600 width and 570 height. This works well for this monitor.

Drop the status icons to the bottom of the main window
Finally, I set View->Hide My Identity Panel to drop my status icons to the bottom of the main window and get rid of the (IMHO) useless icon/name display at the top of the main window.