Empathy

Empathy consists of a rich set of reusable instant messaging widgets, and a GNOME client using those widgets. It uses Telepathy and Nokia's Mission Control, and reuses Gossip's UI. The main goal is to permit desktop integration by providing libempathy and libempathy-gtk libraries. libempathy-gtk is a set of powerful widgets that can be embeded into any GNOME application.

Screenshots

• Empathy 1

• Empathy 2

• Empathy chat themes

• Empathy chatroom

• Empathy accounts

• Empathy call

What's the difference between Empathy and Gossip ?

The difference is in the internal design of the application.

1. Empathy only supports telepathy - no more complex code to support multiple protocols, Telepathy does that for us.
2. Empathy uses MC for account management, which allows other applications to list existing accounts, check whether they are connected and get information through the Telepathy API.
3. Empathy is split into two libraries (libempathy and libempathy-gtk); libempathy provides non-GUI utility functions, and libempathy-gtk allows other GTK and GNOME applications to embed Empathy's widgets.
4. Empathy refactored much code to avoid code duplication and to provide a better and more powerfull API.

All this is only possible using Telepathy and MC and would need substantial refactoring of gossip; this was rejected by Gossip's main developers, so I forked the UI.

Current features

• Multi-protocol: Jabber, Gtalk, MSN, IRC, Salut, and all supported by pidgin
• Account editor (specialized UI for most protocols)
• Auto away and extended away using gnome-screensaver
• Auto re-connect using Network Manager
• Private and group chat (with smileys, spellcheck)
• Powerful theme engine for chats
• Log conversations, view/search in logs and prepend logs in new chats
• Adding new contacts and viewing/editing contact information
• Voice and Video call using SIP and Jingle
• Python bindings for libempathy and libempathy-gtk
• Collaborative work using Tubes
• More to come soon...

Project Resources

• Install instructions

• Debugging tips

• How to contribute using GIT

• Dispatcher documentation

• Roadmap: Overview of what's being worked on and what's planned for the future

• Release tarballs: http://download.gnome.org/sources/empathy

• IRC room is #telepathy on FreeNode (irc.freenode.org). irc://irc.freenode.org/telepathy

• Mailing list is telepathy AT lists.freedesktop.org

• Existing Empathy bugs in GNOME Bugzilla.

• Report an Empathy bug in GNOME Bugzilla

• Feed RSS of commits

Hacking

• Just dive in dammit!