9.14.3 Smileys

Smiley is a package separate from Gnus, but since Gnus is currently the only package that uses Smiley, it is documented here.

In short—to use Smiley in Gnus, put the following in your ~/.gnus.el file:

(setq gnus-treat-display-smileys t)

Smiley maps text smiley faces—‘:-)’, ‘8-)’, ‘:-(’ and the like—to pictures and displays those instead of the text smiley faces. The conversion is controlled by a list of regexps that matches text and maps that to file names.

The alist used is specified by the smiley-regexp-alist variable. The first item in each element is the regexp to be matched; the second element is the regexp match group that is to be replaced by the picture; and the third element is the name of the file to be displayed.

The following variables customize the appearance of the smileys:

smiley-style

Specifies the smiley style. Predefined smiley styles include low-color (small 13x14 pixel, three-color images), medium (more colorful images, 16x16 pixel), and grayscale (grayscale images, 14x14 pixel). The default depends on the height of the default face.

smiley-data-directory

Where Smiley will look for smiley faces files. You shouldn’t set this variable anymore. Customize smiley-style instead.

gnus-smiley-file-types

List of suffixes on smiley file names to try.