My question is related to this one.
So I have a person added to my Gmail contacts, with phone number and e-mail. Person's e-mail is on gmail.com.
Every Gmail account is not just e-mail, but also is Google Hangouts account. So this person could be reached via hangouts.
Out from the box, when adding person to Google contacts, you don't really add him or her to your Hangouts contact list (I have 500+ at-gmail-contacts in my google contacts, but only 10-20 of them are in hangouts contacts). But when you start hangouts chat with this person (from Gmail web-page, or from Android Hangouts app, etc.), person's contact get added to hangouts contacts.
Then, you could use hangouts via "classical" XMPP, using your favourite client app (I use Kopete). When connecting to Google via XMPP with your Gmail login and password, your Jabber client get contact list, which is the same as your Hangouts contact list. So, it contains every person you ever chat via Hangouts.
My question is: how to delete person from Hangouts (or from XMPP, in certain case) contact list, not deleting it from Gmail contacts?
The only option I found is to "block" this contact in Hangouts, but I don't want to: blocking is useful, when you want to get rid of annoying companion or spammer, but sometimes you want just to clean-up your contact list form persons which are not active for the long time, but you don't really mean you don't want them to write you in the future.
Best Answer
The best thing to do then is to hide them.
If you are using the mobile app, then touch and hold on that contact (if visible) and touch on hide contacts. Then if you want to view it, go to settings. There you will find all the hidden contacts.