Moving Pidgin’s Settings

I’m thinking about buying a new desktop computer during the upcoming Black Friday sales. Because of this, I’ve been thinking about moving my data from one computer to another. Most of my really important things are already backed up to an external hard drive every morning, or are kept in my OneDrive folder (or both).

One exception to this are my Pidgin logs and settings. Pidgin is a multi-protocol chat application. I use it to connect to private instant messaging servers I’ve set up at my client sites, so employees can message me when they need help. I often refer to Pidgin’s chat logs for billing purposes, or for troubleshooting, or even for covering my butt when things go sideways. Thing is, though, all of Pidgin’s settings (including the logs) are contained in an AppData folder; that location is hardcoded in the app and can’t be changed. But you can use symlinks to move the folder wherever you want:

1) Completely shut down Pidgin.

2) Go to C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming and cut the .purple folder (substituting the appropriate username, obviously).

3) Paste the .purple folder wherever you’d like. I used a “Pidgin” folder I created in my Documents folder. So Documents > Pidgin > .purple.

4) Open an elevated command-prompt, type the following command on one line, replacing username with your username, and press ENTER when you’re sure it’s been entered correctly:

mklink /D "C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\.purple" "C:\Users\username\OneDrive\Documents\Pidgin\.purple"

The above command (mklink) creates (/D) a symlink in my AppData\Roaming folder called .purple, which points to a folder (also called .purple) in a folder called Pidgin in my Documents folder. Exit the command-prompt when done.

After running this command, all of your Pidgin settings and chat logs will be in your documents folder, but Pidgin will think they’re still in the original location. In my case, the Pidgin data files also be copied to my OneDrive cloud. Since you can create a link anywhere on your drive you want, you could just as easily create a link in your Dropbox or Google Drive folders instead.