Preferences

The Preferences is accessible via the Preferences... option in the Gabber menu. It provides a central location for the user to customize various levels of the way Gabber behaves. Options are available to customize logging, the appearance of the roster, the way messages are sent and received by default, among others.

Main Window

The Main Window preferences tab has several options to affect the display of the main window.

Size and Position

Gabber can keep a memory of the main window size and position if desired. Note that some window managers will conflict with this memory and may cause the window to not appear exactly in the right position.

Toolbars

In addition to being able to manually move the toolbars on the main window around, they can also be disabled. For more information about the main toolbar and the status indicator, see the section called Toolbar and the section called User Status.

Status Docklet

The status docklet can be added or removed from the GNOME panel dock with this option.

Appearance

The appearance of users and chats can be customized with the options on the Appearance preferences tab.

Roster Colors and Icons

The colors for all of the possible items on the roster can be customized using the GNOME color picker. The icons of users can also be enabled/disabled from this tab as well.

Chats

A timestamp for messages can be enabled/disabled for one-on-one chats and group chats.

Messages

Sending and receiving of messages can be customized in detail to suit a user's preference. If one-on-one chats are always preferred, simply enable the option to send all messages as a one-on-one chat by default and enable receiving all messages as one-on-one chats.

All incoming messages can be queued, or stored, for viewing. To disable queuing for specific types of messages, enable the option to automatically open the appropriate message type. Most users will want to automatically open one-on-one chats. See the section called Message Queueing for more information about message queuing.

Encryption

The Encryption preferences dialog has a few very simple options to enable message encryption.

Connection

While most of the options for connecting are available from the Login dialog, a few are also available for editing from the Connection preferences tab.

Logs

Gabber can keep a complete log of incoming and outgoing messages for future retrieval. Most users will want to enable this feature for future use. To save disk space, logs may be purged once a month. It is adviseable to save the logs in XHTML format for viewing in a web browser.

Dates

To customize the date format displayed in logs, simply modify the date format string using the key given on the Dates preferences tab. Most users will not need to modify this string. By default it is set to "%d %b %Y %H:%M:%S".