When you have many conversation tabs open, not all of them can be visible at the same time in the tab bar. This is a problem, because it is easy to miss new messages that arrive to tabs that are not visible. This plugin tries to solve this problem by moving a tab to left whenever a new message arrives to it.

When a new message is received, the currently open tab is moved to the leftmost position in the tab bar and the tab receiving the message is moved immediately next to it.

Install pre-requisite pidgin-devel and libpurple-devel packages. On Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get build-dep pidgin
sudo apt-get install pidgin-dev libpurple-dev

Compiling the plugin

make

Installing the plugin to ~/.purple/plugins/

make install

Enable plugin Leftify Tabs from Pidgin plugins list.