Plugin:TabSRMM/Tips
The features listed here are some of the lesser known and may be only useful in a few situations, but they are quite interesting.
Paste and send
Hit Ctrl+D in the message input area and any text which was in the clipboard will be pasted to the input box and sent immediately. For security reasons (to avoid unwanted sends), this feature is disabled by default and needs to be enabled on Message sessions → General.
Freeze message log
Hit F12 or select Freeze log entry from the message history context menu (right click the message log). This will freeze the log until you turn it off again (simply, hit F12 again). A frozen message log means that no new messages (incoming or outgoing) will be printed to the message window to avoid the automatic message log scrolling. Of course, TabSRMM does not lose any message while the log is frozen. All messages are queued and will be printed together as soon as you unfreeze the log. While active, the message window shows a small hint that the message log is frozen together with the number of queued events.
Auto copy text
When enabled (option is in Message sessions → Message log, TabSRMM will automatically copy text when you release the mouse button after selecting text in the message log history. Holding the Ctrl key while releasing the mouse button will copy the selected text to the message input area automatically. This is default behavior for group chats.
Recall sent messages
This is often also called "input history". Whenever a message is sent, it is saved in a buffer which can hold up to 15 (default value) messages. This buffer uses a first in / first out strategy, so the oldest message will be deleted from the buffer, when all 15 slots are already in use. You can configure the size of the buffer on the Message sessions → Advanced tweaks page. To "scroll" through the list of saved messages, you use the Ctrl+↑ and Ctrl+↓ keyboard shortcuts. When doing so, TabSRMM will automatically save the content of the input area to a temporary buffer, so you won't loose what you already have typed when using the input history feature. Simply type Ctrl+↓ until the text which was written before you recalled an older message reappears.
Single window mode
Although, TabSRMM offers a tabbed environment by default, it does not force you to use tabs. If you prefer the old way – one independent window per contact – you can still have this feature. Go to Message sessions → Containers option page and select single window mode.
Quick session select
The hotkey Ctrl+⇧ Shift+R offers a quick way to focus the session with the most recent (newest) unread event. If there are more than one session with unread events, it will cycle from one to the next. If there are no unread messages, the hotkey is still useful, as it will restore the most recently use message window. This hotkey is a global one, which means it is always available, even if you're working in another application.
Sending options
Some toolbar buttons have small arrows attached. Clicking these, opens a drop-down menu. The send button is one of these buttons, and when you open it, you get a menu with a few options. For example, you can enable/disable the multisend feature from there. Other options include:
- Send without timeouts – when active, TabSRMM will not wait for an answer from the protocol when sending a message. This may resolve the annoying "Timeout" error messages when the other side is experiencing network or other problems. This entry is per contact and it will be saved to the database. There is no global option for this (and this is a good thing, because you shouldn't use this as a default – only use it for contacts which give you "Timeout" errors frequently). Note that you won't be informed when a message delivery fails, so enabling this options means that you'll never know whether a message has been delivered or not. If you want to have this globally, you need to setup it in the protocols options (most protocols offer a setting to disable sending confirmations).
Always trim message log to X events
The global option for this feature can be found on the Message sessions → Message log page (at the very bottom) and there is also a per contact setting in the User Preferences dialog which you can reach from the contacts menu. This option may save memory for people which rarely close their message windows. It trims the content of the message window so that only the X most recent messages are in the log – older messages will be cut of from the beginning of the message log. Of course, this only affects the message window – the feature will not delete messages from the database. If you don't close your message windows often, the chat history may grow immensely thus eating a lot of memory (especially when you use emoticons, because each smiley image consumes quite some memory). This option can help in reducing the memory requirements as it limits the number of messages which can be seen in the message log.