Tyler Clemons

So much fun open source applications are.  Adium allows tons of customization.  The best part is that it does not take an extensive knowledge of Objective-C, Adium’s primary language, to customize some if it’s features.  One customizable feature is the emoticon set.  Emoticons, Emotion Icons, are the combination of characters that resemble faces.  In some web browsers and most chat programs, such as Firefox and Adium, emoticons are automatically translated into pictures.  But there are so many emoticons that some clients do not include every combination.  Good thing we can create our own.

In this example, we are only going to create one new emoticon.  The process can be duplicated easily by copying and pasting.  To start, create a folder called Name.adiumemoticonset.  The name doesn’t really matter as long as you remember it later.  Right click(CTLR+click) on your new folder, it should be a smiley face, and click ‘Show Package Contents.’ Open up the Property List Editor to create a .plist file. Name this file Emoticons.plist.

Click HERE for a shell of the .plist file.

That is all there is too customizing your own Adium “smiley set”.  Yourpic.png is the element that controls which picture is called when the proper emoticon appears.  In this case, the emoticon :) , most know it as , will cause Yourpic.png to show up.  You can assign any number of emoticons to a particular picture by adding more nodes under Equivalents.  Just copy and paste for more elements.

Yourpic.png, and any other .pngs, are stored in the same directory as Emoticons.plist.  All of them are stored in the main directory of the package.  Most .png files are around (19-21)x(19-21).  You don’t have to conform to the size limits but you might not want large files crowding your chat window. Also note, the emoticons only appear on your end, so whomever you are talking with will only see their representation of :) and not Yourpic.png.

Your files will be installed in Library/Application Support/Adium 2.0/Emoticons