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Comment by rconti | Hacker News Reader

That's ironic. At least in the brief time I used Windows, Trillian had the worst dumpster fire of a UI. I can't say I really liked Windows UI, but they didn't even attempt to conform to it to make it half-usable.

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That's funny because the UI is one thing I think stood out positively about Trillian but that might be my rose-tinted glasses and youthful tastes talking.

Nah, I used Trillian (Lifetime licence) until just a few years ago when I realized that everyone is siloed in Signal, WA, etc. The UI was still great.

But that might be related to me hating the UI of WA, Signal, Telegram etc. Even Gajim switched to this shitty UI style (sidenote: Any usable Windows XMPP/Jabber client that still looks good, with good = "userlist, plus chats in separate windows"?), so I’m starting to think it might be possible that most people don’t hate it ;)

edit: There’s AstraChat which looks nice and apparently supports WA, alas, it’s commercial, and they don’t seem interested in selling to non-enterprise users.

I wish I could remember the details of why I thought it was so awful. I mean, not even the title bar and minimize/maximize icon conformed to the Windows standards. There were other things that didn't work right-- standard windows keyboard shortcuts-- but I forget which. This would have been in 2006-2010 or thereabouts.

I remember it was non-standard too, but that's why I liked it; Windows didn't look nice to begin with.

IIRC it had skins and plugins so you could customize the UI.

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