Immediate Access to Trillian Chat History

As you may know from my past posts I'm trying to withstand the temptation of installing beta versions of individual instant messaging clients the moment they are released. Over the years I've become rather attached to Trillian, although there are some creases in the surface because of the increasingly buggy releases that have come out over the past year.

When Cerulean Studios released version 3.0, I realized a bit late that their programmers made the chat history logs much less easily accessible in return for advanced features such as bookmarks and so on. Frankly speaking, I don't use bookmarks at all and I don't like the 'fancy' time-lined synoptic view of my chat logs. I need my chat logs to be full-text so that I can quickly overview them and of course find whatever I'm looking for. It was about time that I created an active word that would allow me to do exactly that.

I just created a fairly simple, generic ActiveWords script for the purpose of opening any contact's chat log in the default text editor. The script assumes that you select a contact in your Trillian contact list.

Short Note on Naming this Active Word
Note that the Trillian contact pane is keyboard sensitive: anything you type will be processed by Trillian in an attempt to select a contact starting with the letters typed. Of course you can work around this by using the ActiveWords action pad to trigger your script, but why not do this: assuming you don't have a contact name starting with a backslash, name your script \his (including the backslash). None of your contacts will likely start with a backslash, so your currently selected contact name will stay intact.

This is the script:
<SHIFT><F10></SHIFT><UP><ENTER>
<ALT><TAB></ALT><DELAY:100>
<ALT><TAB></ALT><ALT>f</ALT>
<ENTER><WAIT FOR WINDOW:TITLE
=Notepad><CTRL><END></CTRL>

Breaking it down into Pieces
<SHIFT><F10></SHIFT>: open the context menu for the selected contact

<UP><ENTER>: select View Contact History

<ALT><TAB></ALT><DELAY:100>
<ALT><TAB></ALT>: force focus to the Contact History window. Initially, Trillian opens the window all right, but it does give it focus properly. By Alt-Tabbing back and forth, the Contact History window does get focus.

<ALT>f</ALT><ENTER>: open the File menu and select View as Text

<WAIT FOR WINDOW:TITLE=Notepad>: wait until the default editor opens. You may need to specify a different default editor here.

<CTRL><END></CTRL>: move to the end of the document (because I usually want to see the most recent portion of the chat log).

Tip to Access Specific Log Files
If you like, you could also open the chat log of any individual contact directly by locating it on your hard drive. On my system, for example, the chat logs are located in this folder: C:\Program Files\Trillian\users\default\logs. If you then drag any of the *.log files to the ActiveWords monitor bar, ActiveWords will automatically create an active word of the file type for you. Try it. The entire monitor bar is a drag and drop area, but I mostly use the rightmost part. As a name for this type of active word, I suggest initials+imh, for example, if your contact's name is Marjolein Hoekstra, the active word would be called mhimh.

As a challenge for you I suggest that you create an active word that opens my chat window and sends the url that you opened most recently to me. If you like you may add me to your buddy list for practicing purposes—I'm Chopianissima on most systems.

Next Post
In my next post I will explain how you can look up proper usage of any English word, just by selecting that word and pressing F8. As an example I will use the online version of Advanced Learner's Dictionary by Cambridge University Press.

I kindly welcome feedback.