tech

Drawing on my experience yesterday of helping put together a set of key bindings for AOL Instant Messenger ascii emoticons, I set out this morning to make a custom smiley pack for Pidgin using the AIM smileys.

The documentation for making a Pidgin smiley pack is extremely easy, and someone has probably already put together a smiley pack that contains the AIM smileys, but I felt like giving it a try myself so here is what I came up with.

I don’t know what the copyright or distribution rights are for these AIM smileys, but you can find them online for download.

1. Browse to your %APPDATA%\.purple\smileys directory (how to find your .purple directory) and create a new folder called “aim”
2. Download the AIM smileys from somewhere on the internet and put them in that folder.
3. Create a new text file called “theme” with no extension and copy/paste the code below in to it. If your filenames are different or you want to change the ascii text associated with each, feel free to do so. Also, this will be the default smiley theme for all IM protocols. If you want to change that, refer back to the documentation.
   
4. In Pidgin, go to Tools | Preferences | Themes tab and change the Smiley theme to the new one which should show up.
5. Try it out in any chat window!

“theme” file:

Name=AIM
Description=AIM/AOL Smileys
Icon=happy10.gif
Author=chousey

[default]

angel10.gif        o:-) O:-) O:)
angry10.gif        >:O >:o
biggrin10.gif        :-D :D
confused10.gif        :-\\ :\\ :-/ :/
cool10.gif        8-) 8)
crying10.gif        :'( :*( ;(
embarrassed10.gif    :-[ :[
footinmouth10.gif    :-! :!
happy10.gif        :-) :)
indifferent10.gif    :-$ :$
nospeak10.gif        :-X :X
redlips10.gif        :-* :*
sad10.gif        :-( :(
shocked10.gif        =-O :-O =O :O
tongueout10.gif        :-P :P
wink10.gif        ;-) ;)
heart.gif        <3

I added some extra ways to type the emoticons since some people include the nose or not, or type it slightly differently. If you type it differently than what I’ve listed, just add yours on the same line, separated by a space.

I also included a <3 for a heart.gif file which you can find online. I emailed myself a heart emoticon via Gmail and then saved it in to my aim folder to use with the theme.

Enjoy.

Recently, vanberge and rusty have been longing to use the classic AIM emoticon keyboard shortcuts in Pidgin.

Pidgin trac ticket 2675 from three years ago indicated they weren’t going to implement this functionality but one could implement using keyboard bindings in the gtkrc-2.0 file as described in the FAQ. (See also the sample gtkrc-2.0 file for other options that one could use with Pidgin.)

Anyway, I put together a set of bindings to mimic the AIM keyboard shortcuts. <CTRL>+1 through 8 worked as expected, but I had trouble getting the <CTRL>+<SHIFT>+# ones to work until vanberge asked the friendly folks in #pidgin how to do it, so kudos to him for figuring that part out.

To use these bindings, find your “.purple” directory and if the gtkrc-2.0 file doesn’t already exist (mine didn’t), create a new one called “gtkrc-2.0″ and copy/paste the following lines in to it (use the “view source” icon in the upper right of the code box below to open the code in a new window without line numbers or “copy to clipboard” to copy directly to your clipboard)

binding "aim-emoticon-shortcuts"
{
 bind "<ctrl>1" { "insert-at-cursor" (":-)") }
 bind "<ctrl>2" { "insert-at-cursor" (":-(") }
 bind "<ctrl>3" { "insert-at-cursor" (";-)") }
 bind "<ctrl>4" { "insert-at-cursor" (":-P") }
 bind "<ctrl>5" { "insert-at-cursor" ("=-O") }
 bind "<ctrl>6" { "insert-at-cursor" (":-*") }
 bind "<ctrl>7" { "insert-at-cursor" (">:O") }
 bind "<ctrl>8" { "insert-at-cursor" ("8-)") }
 bind "<ctrl>exclam" { "insert-at-cursor" (":-$") }
 bind "<ctrl>at" { "insert-at-cursor" (":-!") }
 bind "<ctrl>numbersign" { "insert-at-cursor" (":-[") }
 bind "<ctrl>dollar" { "insert-at-cursor" ("O:-)") }
 bind "<ctrl>percent" { "insert-at-cursor" (":-/") }
 bind "<ctrl>asciicircum" { "insert-at-cursor" (":'(") }
 bind "<ctrl>ampersand" { "insert-at-cursor" (":-X") }
 bind "<ctrl>asterisk" { "insert-at-cursor" (":-D") }
}
widget "*pidgin_conv_entry" binding "aim-emoticon-shortcuts"

Once the gtkrc-2.0 file has been created/updated/saved, restart Pidgin. Once back in any chat window, use the shortcuts to insert the emoticon text, just like in AIM!