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Tips and tricks

The features listed here are some of the lesser known and may be only useful in a few situations, but I still think that they are quite intersting and you won't find most of them in other plugins.

Contents 1 Tips and tricks 1.1 Paste and Send 1.2 Freeze message log 1.3 Auto copy text 1.4 Recall sent messages 1.5 Single window mode 1.6 Quick session select 1.7 Access user notes in the message window 1.8 Sending options 1.9 Don't send unicode parts for plain ANSI messages 1.10 Always trim message log to X events

Of course, that list is far from being complete, as tabSRMM has so much features that even myself lost track somewhat :)

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[tab].

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 loose 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[tab], 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. 'Note: this is default behaviour 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->Tabs and Layout[tab] page.

To "scroll" through the list of saved messages, you use the Ctrl-up and Ctrl-down 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 haved typed when using the input history feature. Simply type _Ctrl-down_ 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[tab] 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. You may need to enable it though, and you can find the option on the Message Sessions->Tabs and Layout[tab] option page (in the list box, search for "Enable global hotkeys"). The default modifier is CTRL-SHIFT, but you can change that on the same page.

Access user notes in the message window

When the info panel is active, it will show a small arrow button at the left window edge. Click this button to switch the infopanel to *Notes* mode. A small textbox will appear, allowing you to write some random text which will be saved in the contacts database record. This content is shared with the content on the Notes page of the User Info dialog. The text is saved whenever you close a message window.

Sending options

Some toolbar buttons have small arrows attached. Clicking these, opens a dropdown 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 %{color:green}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).
  

• Force ANSI - don't send as unicode - may be used to solve a few problems with incompatible clients. Also, this is a per contact setting and you should only enable it when you have problems with a certain contact.
  

Don't send unicode parts for plain ANSI messages

This option, available from the Message Sessions->General[tab] option page (last entry in the list of options) will analyze every outgoing message and when it finds out that a message does only contain plain 7bit ANSI characters (no special national characters or symbols) it will not save the unicode part of the message to the history and thus avoid quite *a lot* of database bloat (saving both ANSI and UNICODE part means that a message with 10 characters will actually consume 30 bytes in the history - saving the ANSI part only will only take 10 bytes - factor 1:3 always applies). This basically works for standard text (letters a-z small/capital, numbers, common punctuation characters) so most messages written in "plain english" can be saved without storing a UNICODE part.

Always trim message log to X events

The *global* option for this feature can be found on the Message Sessions.>Message Log[tab] page (at the very botton) 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.

Ok, that's all for now. I hope, that can be useful and I may extend this document at some time or maybe when someone gives a hint about another rarely used and generally unknown feature.

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