Way to Instant Message from main chatbar

I wish there was a way to do it. It's one of the features I know from fulltext chat like IRC that I do not see in SL, and I would very much consider it useful and a more efficient approach to IMing, in some cases.

IM replies appear within the main body of chat, even when the IM window is closed -- so why not extend this and make it fully bidirectional?

You could do something like this, a command such as:


/im Francis Chung STOP MAKE GREEFER TOOLS


Or, in the case of keeping things simple, you could assign shortcuts for contacts and have partial-name matching such as:


/im Fran TOO MANY HUG CRUSH MY AVATAR BONES


You could also have each IM tabbed window (within the IM window itself) have a number assigned to it, and when you receive a message, it would show you the number next to the avatar's name. So, you could holla back


/im 3 SLIBEL FOR U


With the "3" representing Francis Chung, "Queen of Content".

I feel it would be sweeeet to have this feature. Imagine the convenience.


/im Jadey honey i'm coming home


And optionally, just like the main chat area is configurable-translucent, perhaps the IM window could be too? It can take up so much space and is kind of redundant if you're comfortable with parsing the incoming text -- and for that matter, perhaps IMs should have their own color in chat?

I hate the chat window 'cause it just gets in my way, but I love to IM

I like this suggestion a lot, but would like it to work without the so much typing part. Like if instead of typing "/im torley" and then typing what you wanted, if there was a little popup menu of people online next to your chat box (kinda like the gestures) so you could select one then just chat with them. Maybe you could do something like hitting tab would automatically switch to the next person or something...

/me gets back to *playing* SL...

Yeah, even better -- a quick-access button! Great idea.