Messages App Not Showing Conversation List

You could try going into your Home Library (~/Library) and going to the Preferences Folder and deleting the Plist File for Messages worked for me with the same issue.

Hi,

Messages is capable of displaying single chats in windows like the one that was posted.

The Main Messages window can then be hidden and a single chat can be continued in the open window minus th side bar.

However as you say you cannot see other chats this way and seeing new messages can be difficult.

In ~/Library/Preferences com.apple.ichat.plist should be the one that holds the windowing info.

Deleting this will need Messages to be restarted and any Setting not at default will need to be reset (Font, Colours of Balloons or Text etc)

10:35 pm Wednesday; October 23, 2013

 iMac 2.5Ghz 5i 2011 (Mountain Lion 10.8.4)
 G4/1GhzDual MDD (Leopard 10.5.8)
 MacBookPro 2Gb (Snow Leopard 10.6.8)
 Mac OS X (10.6.8),
 Couple of iPhones and an iPad

Sorry for the late reply its was the middle of the night when i was doing this never a good idea Ha, I think i deleted the Messeges Plist and anything Messenges looking that had the date and time of when i did the initial install followed by restarting the application. also check that youre signed in to all your online accounts.

Have the same problem as stu. Was not able to solve it so far with deleting .plist suggested from Ralph. I also deleted all .plist related with imessage. Did not help either....

HI All,

Very odd.

Have opened the com.apple.ichat.plist with Xcode

Part of it reads as follows:-

This implies there is a setting for having a Single Chat window.

However there is no setting in Messages where you can set this.

You can also see the line above is about having an Automatic Chat List

Message In Text Style at the top refers to the ability for you to set the Incoming Override in Messages > Preferences > Viewing.

The last line I have grabbed in the pick is set from the View Menu when you have Unified Buddy list on display.

(i.e. there appears to be no real order in the stored items in the .plist)

AS I said earlier it is possible to create a One Chat window and this may be enough to set the highlighted item to YES.

However I am not in a position to try this out right this minute.

Also deleting the .plist should return it to defaults.

EDIT.

Tested. It does not change the setting.

At this point I am not sure what to suggest next.

8:37 pm Thursday; October 24, 2013

 iMac 2.5Ghz 5i 2011 (Mountain Lion 10.8.4)
 G4/1GhzDual MDD (Leopard 10.5.8)
 MacBookPro 2Gb (Snow Leopard 10.6.8)
 Mac OS X (10.6.8),
 Couple of iPhones and an iPad

HI,

.plist with those sorts of numbers in the name are stored in case you ever use a Network boot.

Mostly they appear in ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost but sometimes you see them directly in the Preferences folder, loose with other .plists

They can be deleted (for purposes of tidying) if you don't want them.

They do not effect the functioning of Messages (or any other app they are generated by).

EDIT.

The Lockfile does not appear to do anything (It did not in Mountain Lion anyway).

They do seem to get recreated if deleted though.

9:04 pm Thursday; October 24, 2013

 iMac 2.5Ghz 5i 2011 (Mountain Lion 10.8.4)
 G4/1GhzDual MDD (Leopard 10.5.8)
 MacBookPro 2Gb (Snow Leopard 10.6.8)
 Mac OS X (10.6.8),
 Couple of iPhones and an iPad

Message was edited by: Ralph Johns (UK)

I was having this problem as well, but only on an iMac that I'd taken from 10.7 to 10.9, NOT on a much cleaner MacBook that was already on 10.8. The iMac also has the cruft of being the product of upgrades and disk transplants (i.e. no "clean" installs) dating back to Rhapsody DR2, while the MacBook had a clean install of 10.8(.3?) less than a year ago, so the exact reason for the diffeence is far from certain.

I also got no relief from whacking everything I could find in ~/Library related to iChat or Messages, so I looked at the preferences on both machines through the same API lens that Messages uses, via the 'defaults' command, hoping to find some difference that would explain the problem. Fortunately, I didn't have to do a detailed comparison of every window sub-view parameter, because the 'com.apple.iChat' domain had about 60% more content on the bad machine than on the good one, including settings that could never be in a fresh default settings package. The OS apparently remembered all my ancient tweaking cruft despite the deletion of all the places it lived on disk, and restored it all when Messages was relaunched.

So the fix was simple. With Messages not running, I ran this command in a Terminal session:

defaults delete com.apple.iChat

After that, I launched Messages and it was fine. All my settings tweaks were gone, but that is a minor issue.

TNX! Worked find with me as well!

THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!! And thanks stu_douglas for the Terminal hint.

Glad it worked for you too!

You actually should not need to 'cd' into the Preferences directory first, since the 'defaults' tool isn't just looking nearby for files, it uses the MacOS APIs for handling "domains" of preferences, which is the same way applications like Messages (which calls its domain 'com.apple.iChat' because it is replaced the old iChat app) read and write their settings. Most apps don't (and shouldn't) maintain the files in ~/Library/Preferences/ themselves, but rather they call system APIs which usually boil down to reading and writing .plist files in ~Library/Preferences/, but which can do more complicated and non-obvious things. In all cases where a program uses a

~Library/Preferences/<dotted.app.domain>.plist

Humm,

It was what I said on the 23rd

In ~/Library/Preferences com.apple.ichat.plist should be the one that holds the windowing info.

Deleting this will need Messages to be restarted and any Setting not at default will need to be reset (Font, Colours of Balloons or Text etc)

Although this is a Manual method as not everyone is comfortable with Terminal it does achieve the same thing.

I specified this one over the Anthony Platt "Messages" ones that had been posted earlier.

Glad to hear you have it up and running.

8:54 pm Friday; October 25, 2013

 iMac 2.5Ghz 5i 2011 (Mountain Lion 10.8.4)
 G4/1GhzDual MDD (Leopard 10.5.8)
 MacBookPro 2Gb (Snow Leopard 10.6.8)
 Mac OS X (10.6.8),
 Couple of iPhones and an iPad