Tkabber supports emoticon sets. The related XEP-0038 is deferred but it's widely used by XMPP-clients out there.

Using emoticons

To insert an emoticon just type its mnemonic into the message you're composing, like this:

:-)

Alternatively, the palette with all of the emoticons from the active set is available via the <Alt-e> keyboard shortcut available in all chat input windows. Pressing it will bring a menu with emoticons; select one by clicking on it and it will be inserted in the message at the cursor position.

Pleae note several important things ignoring which often causes undesired effects with regard to netiquette:

• Emoticons are not pictures themselves — they're typed in and transmitted as text and then may be rendered by the receiving software as images.
• This means two things: first, they may not be rendered at all (people often turn rendering of emoticons off completely) and so they will be seen by such people just as the text mnemonics like ":-)", second, they may be rendered using an image completely different from yours if the emoticon sets differ between your XMPP-client and that of your reader(s).
• There are no more that 4 or 5 standard, understandable by any netizen, emoticons, they are: :-), ;-), :-D, :-( and their "noseless" variations. Anything besides them which your large and fancy emoticon set with 100+ faces offers to you can cause your peer(s) to stuck trying to decypher what did you mean by that cryptic piece of text they're seeing in place of your picture.

Changing the active set of emoticons

To change the active set of emoticons first navigate to the "Customize" entry in the "Tkabber" main menu entry. Then in the Customize window navigate to to the appropriate group of settings: "Chat" → "Emoticons".

The setting to change there is ::plugins::emoticons::options(theme) — just use the associated menu widget to select the emoticons set you like then save the setting using the button named State nearby.

How Tkabber finds sets of emoticons

Tkabber, starting from version 0.10.0 looks into two "standard places" to find sets of emoticons, these are, in order:

1. Directory named emoticons in the root Tkabber folder (to which it's installed). The sets located there are built-in (while no one prevents you from modifying the contents of this directory.
2. Directory named emoticons (same as above) in the Tkabber's configuration directory (more on this in a moment). The sets located there are considered to be in the user's domain and any new sets are better added here.

At startup, Tkabber scans these two folders looking for subfolders representing the installed sets of emoticons and looks for a file named icondef.xml in them. Each found file is parsed to get the proper name of the iconset. These names and their respective sets are recorded and made available to the user to choose from using the Customize interface.

Installation of a new emoticon set

The canonical way of installing new emoticon sets is to place the folder with the iconset to one of the "standard places" mentioned above, preferably — in the user's emoticons directory.

Location of the Tkabber's configuration directory is governed by somewhat complicated rules which can be studied in the documentation, but the no-brainer rules are:

*nix systems

This is the ~/.tkabber directory.

Windows

This is the folder named Tkabber in the "application data" standard system place. So this is something like:

• C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Tkabber on Windows 2000 through XP/Windows 2003 server.
• C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Tkabber on Vista.

So, create a folder named emoticons (if it isn't already there) in the Tkabber's configuration directory and place any new sets of emoticons there.

After restart Tkabber will find your new emoticon set(s) and will make them available via the Customize (see above).

A note on JISP-files

JISP-files (emoticon sets distributed in the form of single files ending in the ".jisp" extension) are just ZIP-compressed files containing the directory with an emoticon set.

As of the current version (0.10.0) Tkabber doesn't support JISP-files "as is" (though the ongoing 0.10.1 will do this) so if you have downloaded a JISP file you currently have to extract the directory contained in it. To do this use any archiver application supporting ZIP. If you are on Windows XP and above, the simplest way is to change the file's extension from ".jisp" to ".zip", then just "enter" the resulting file in Windows Explorer and then drag and drop the directory it contains into the right folder as described above.

Specifying the active emoticons set via the configuration file

Note that this way is not needed normally and end users should better use the way explained above. The method involving editing the Tkabber's config file — config.tcl — is only needed in these two cases:

• You want all the settings to be contained in the main configuration file (so that they override the Customize mechanism), possibly to have them specially commented or you may be you just feel like hacking.
• You want to keep your emoticon set in a place outside of the Tkabber's "standard places" for emoticon sets. Currently this can only be done using the method which will be explained right now.

For Tkabber to load an arbitrary emoticon set, add a line like this to the config.tcl file located in the Tkabber's configuration directory (create this file if it's not already there):

set ::plugins::emoticons::options(theme) /path/to/the/emoticon/set/folder

At its next run, Tkabber will load the set of emoticons from the specified directory.

Links

• Смайлики и аватары is an article about Tkabber emoticons in Russian
• Some old emoticon sets for Tkabber
• Puz set
• IconStyles Home at Theoretic.com
• Jabber Icons
• Halloween Emoticon Center