I've started playing around with xmonad recently and really like it. I
was sort of annoyed that I had to run a system tray program to see
whether or not I have pending unread messages in Pidgin, so I tried to
write a small program that I could use to pipe the number of unread
messages to a dzen instance.
I just hacked this up tonight using the Pidgin DBUS API. The logic
isn't 100% correct (if you have a conversation window in the pidgin
foreground but pidgin isn't an active window, it still thinks you've
read the message), and I'm not a good enough C hacker to really be
confident that I really understand how the Pidgin DBUS API works and
if this is the correct way to figure out how many unread messages
there are, but it might inspire someone smarter than myself to take a
look and write something better ;-)
For your enjoyment: http://static.eklitzke.org/pidgin-dzen.tar.gz
P.S. The code is in Python, but if nothing else this should give you a
start if you want to try to implement this in Haskell or some other
language.
--
Evan Klitzke