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 <evan@yelp.com>