Question

How to close several tabs in a pidgin conversation window from a script (some #general and #nickserv tabs). I tried using xdotool and devilspie but no result.

Answer 1

You can use Pidgin’s DBus API to close a conversation. See Pidgin’s DbusHowto. The following Python code closes all conversation windows with name matching the to_close list. (I tested this with IM usernames, but not with IRC chatroom names, so it may require some additional tweaking for your purposes.)

to_close = ["#general", "nickserv"]
for conv in purple.PurpleGetConversations():
    if purple.PurpleConversationGetName(conv) in to_close:
        purple.PurpleConversationDestroy(conv)

Put the following at the top of your Python file to initialize the purple object for communicating with Pidgin/Finch over D-Bus (from the DbusHowTo):

#!/usr/bin/env python
import dbus
import sys

# Based off http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/DbusHowto
bus = dbus.SessionBus()
obj = bus.get_object("im.pidgin.purple.PurpleService",
                     "/im/pidgin/purple/PurpleObject")
purple = dbus.Interface(obj, "im.pidgin.purple.PurpleInterface")

For those of you who don’t like Python, here’s the same thing rewritten in sh using purple-remote (note that for arg iterates over the arguments to the script):

#!/bin/sh
# Note that the result of sed here is a string like "(1234) (5678)".
for conversation in `purple-remote PurpleGetConversations | sed 's/^.*[[]//' | sed 's/].*$//' | sed s/dbus.Int32//g | sed s/,//g`
do
    conv_name=`purple-remote "PurpleConversationGetName$conversation"`
    for arg
    do
        if [ "$arg" = "$conv_name" ]
        then
            purple-remote "PurpleConversationDestroy$conversation"
        fi
    done
done

I am completely unsure how brittle that pipeline of seds is, though. The Python seems much cleaner.