MacOS – run multiple instances of Skype on one computer

macosmultitaskingskype

I am a heavy Skype user – I use it for work and to communicate with friends. Little by little my contact list grew to almost 800 people. It's really difficult to handle my contacts and put them in different lists. Searching for contacts is also not intuitive and easy task – people like to use strange usernames for Skype.

I need to divide my contacts and use two instances of Skype – for business and personal use. Do you know a way I can do that and stay online in both accounts at the same time?

Best Answer

multiple copies of Skype can only run under separate user accounts, making for some unfortunate but not critical overhead. create another user account on your Mac, either business or personal. then from the other one, open Terminal and do:

$ su - [your other username]
$ /Applications/Skype.app/Contents/MacOS/Skype &

after which you can close the terminal.

edit: after running this after a bit, i should note that you will run into fun issues like separate clipboards, links opening in separate browsers, and possibly other multi-user issues which i havent run into yet.