Why not?

This is standard operation in GTK+.

You might be thinking that the message entry is a GtkEntry, but infact, it is a GtkTextView.

I'm a bit annoyed by the insert-tab behavior, just for the reason that tab in a group chat means tab-complete on nicks, and I kind of use it out of habit in regular chats as well.

So I would prefer to make tab do nothing at all (including not changing focus). You can still use ctrl-tab to change focus which is the standard way to switch focus from widgets that eat Tab presses.

If it's a GtkTextView, it's as simple as setting one single property (accepts_tab).

No, we have to "eat" the keypress otherwise it will change focus...

Ok, I am going to close this, I don't think we should change this, even if we do, we are only going to make it do nothing, and it works fine as is IMO.

I tend to agree with Richard and Wouter on this one for the sake of behaving the same way in the group chat as in regular chat. The text area can not really be compared to other text areas just because it happens to be the same widget. First of all it should be compared to a text entry since that is what the user thinks it is (not sure if text area and text entry behaves differently here).

But I can not think of any time where you would like to insert a tab into a chat sentense.

Reopening and changing the summary.

Fixed (sorry Martyn ;).