Opera chat mods

This page is dedicated to styles for Opera's IRC chat client. As you can guess, even the chat window's look is controlled by css, so you can make it look almost any way you like. I have some tools as well.

New! Puffin styles!

Read the bottom of the page for installation instructions.

Chat styles

Opera 7.5 final

Opera chat in Opera 7.5 skin style Preview
Since the Default skin in Opera 7.5 was so refreshing, I just had to make an Opera 7.5 final IRC style :-)

Get the Opera 7.5 stylesheet here

Cocoa

Opera chat in Cocoa skin style Preview
One of the first skins I really fell inn love with was the cocoa skin by Lars KL. So here is a stylesheet that blends nicely with that skin.

Get the Cocoa stylesheet here

BluesM

Opera chat in BluesM skin style Preview
The infamous BluesM style.

Get the BluesM stylesheet here

Bonsai

Opera chat with bonsai style Preview
A pretty thorough modification of the chat window with Chinese letters reading "Opera Chat", a lush mountainside and an 'online' bonsai.

Get the Bonsai stylesheet here. (a light version without the mountainside).

City blues

Opera chat with City Blues style Preview
Skyscrapers (from Sidney) and cold steel in harmony.

Get the City Blues stylesheet here (a light version without the skyscrapers).

Native

Opera chat with native style Preview
Purely native style, this means menu colors, menu fonts. Love it or hate it. Extremely fast and light on memory use. Note that some colors are still fixed so if you use dark blue or dark red in the interface or as window background, these will not look too good. Press preview to see how it looks at YOUR machine.

Get the Native stylesheet here

mIRC

Opera chat with mIRC style Preview
Completely redone: Opera mIRC style. (No graphic smilies either ;-)

Get the mIRC stylesheet here

Puffin

Opera chat in puffin style Preview
Orca has made some progress in his quest to make Opera Software use the puffin as their mascot, and I agree! He even made some Chat styles for it :-)

Get the Puffin stylesheet here

Puffin II

Opera chat in Puffin 2 style Preview
A second version, working hard.

Get the Puffin II stylesheet here

Orca

Opera chat in orca style Preview
Orca's having fun in an unknown location, courtesy of <Orca> of irc.opera.com.

Get the Orca stylesheet here

Orca II

Opera chat in orca style Preview
A more stunning version of the above, also by <Orca>.
(Note: You need about 1Ghz Processor or more to use this one, else it will take some resources and become pretty slow.)

Get the Orca II stylesheet here

Orca mountain

Opera chat in winter mountain style Preview
Winter in orca-land. This is Norways national mountain Stetind, which watches over the fjord Tysfjord where hundreds of orcas from the atlantic gather every november to january to feed on herring. People wanted to move keiko here, but that never happened, and the rest is history...

Get the Orca mountain stylesheet here

Installation instructions

Installing these styles is a matter of replacing a file called im.css which opera uses to control the looks of the chat window. To install it you need basic understanding of how to save and rename files.

If you need to learn how to locate and rename files, please read Managing Files in Windows XP Home Edition

Now for the actual instructions:

  1. Download the stylesheet of choice and save it in the same folder where the original im.css is (eg. C:\Program files\Opera\styles).
  2. Open the mentioned folder.
  3. If you want to keep the current style, rename the file called im.css into for example original_im.css.
  4. Then rename the downloaded file into im.css.
  5. You are done! To apply the new style to any chat room windows you have open, you need to close and open them again.

All these style sheets are pretty large due to the fact that they use what is called data:url's for images. This means instead of linking to external ones, the images are embedded inside the CSS files themselves (You see them as a lot of incomprehensible code in the stylesheet).

More styles coming here...
Look to Tarquin's opera styles for others.

Chat Tools

Opera chat smileys menu I have made a new menu useful for chatting too. It will place itself in the 'edit widget' popup menu and let you insert smileys and some chat related commands in the chat text field. Click here to install it

I also have a Chat Commands Panel, listing all the commands you can perform in Opera's chat. I'm continously updating it, so you might want to just use the panel at this address instead of saving it to your own drive.