Turning off smileys in iChat 4
July 10th, 2008
Instant message has become a part of my daily life. I use it pretty much non stop for work, and my work involves writing a lot of code. It isn’t uncommon for me to send something like
if ($a=($b+$c))
I like iChat (Adium of course is the old favourite, but hasn’t been used much since I moved to Leopard and Apple improved iChat so much), but sometimes it’s too cute for its own good. This is especially true of the “helpful” way it converts :) and ;) into 
and 
respectively. Helpful in the same way that Clippy was helpful.
This behaviour gets very annoying when one is trying to look at code. The above code example becomes 
. You can image how annoying this is when every third line of chat is code. So I went hunting through the iChat preferences to find a little box I could uncheck and turn off smileys, only there was no box to be found.
A quick trip through google didn’t turn up too much either, but I was able to figure out where iChat kept its preferences for that. A minute later, I had figured out a way to turn them off. Here’s how:
Browse to /Applications/iChat.app, and “Show Package Contents”.
Next up, browse into Contents/Resources/English.lproj and look for a file called SmileyTable.plist. This is where all the smiley definitions are stored. Without it, iChat can’t translate smiles, so rename it to “SmileyTable.plist.banished”. If you ever want smileys back, just reverse the process!
There, that feels better
This entry was made on July 10th, 2008 @ 16:08 and filed into How-To, Mac.
Peter Snyder wrote on July 10th, 2008 @ 20:32
Hey, a simpler answer is just to go view->Messages->Hide Smilies.
Hope that helps!