Is there any way to connect to Stack Exchange chat rooms in Pidgin or Empathy or a different chat program?
2 Answers
No. Various people are working on doing that by manually handling the Javascript, but there is no official API or anything like that.
FWIW, I think using well-known protocols/clients is the killer feature chat is missing and would love to see that happen.
On Meta Stack Overflow, there is a request for XMPP support which is marked status-deferred. An unofficial XMPP bridge is mentioned in this answer to that question.