About Emoticons

Wikipedia states:

A portmanteau of emotion (or emote) and icon, an emoticon is a symbol or combination of symbols used to convey emotional content in written or message form.

Gajim automatically replaces emoticons with cute icons. It is possible to change emoticon theme, that is, change the icon set Gajim will use to represent emotions. You are free, however, to disable emoticons completely, if you find them disturbing.

Basic Emoticons

This section describes basic emoticons understood by Gajim.

:) :-)		A smiling face with and without a nose
8) B-)		A face with sunglasses, meaning that something is soo cool :)
;) ;-)		A winking face
xD :D :> :-> :-D		A laughing face
:( :-(		A sad face
;( ;( ;'-( :'(		A crying face, or simply a tear
:/ :-S :S :-/		A doubtful or sarcastic face
:$ :-$		A confused face
:@ :-@		A mad face
:[		A bat
:* :-*		A virtual kiss
:| :-|		An expressionless or irritated face
>:) >:-)		Evil grin of Satan
:P :-P		A face sticking out a tongue
:O :-O		A really surprised face
<3		A heart, symbol of love
`:3` >:3		A lion, or a kitty

MSN-specific Emoticons

(@)
(%)
(S)
(I)
(8)
(B)
(L)
(6)
(W)
(Z)
(X)
(E)
(N)
(P)
(K)
(Y)
(})
(U)
(F)
(H)
(D)
(T)
(C)
({)
(*)
(R)

Creating Your Own Emoticon Sets

A good place to start is to have a look at emoticons.py file, located in every directory under data/emoticons/. This file is a typical python source file, containing a single dictionary named emoticons. The dictionary holds several string pairs, where first string in a pair (a key) is an icon file name, while the second one (a value) is a list of emoticons. You can specify relative paths here, in this case Gajim will look for icon files in the same directory. So the most basic emoticon set can be a single folder containing emoticons.py file and a single icon:

simple-set/
    emoticons.py
    smile.png

The emoticons.py will look as follows:

emoticons = {
	        'smile.png': [':)', ':-)'],
}

Between 0.11.4 and 0.12 releases, emoticons.py format has changed. Here is a small script that convert old format (0.11.4 and before) to new format (0.12 and after)

python -c """import emoticons,pprint; print 'emoticons = ', pprint.pprint( dict([(file, [i for i in emoticons.emoticons.keys() if emoticons.emoticons[i] == file]) for file in set(emoticons.emoticons.values())]))""" > emoticons1.py

Just run it in your emoticons folder, check that everything is ok in emoticons1.py, and rename it to emoticons.py.