Tin Foil Soldier

What Is Gaim? - Gaim
Gaim is a multi-protocol instant messaging (IM) client for Linux, BSD, MacOS X, and Windows. It is compatible with AIM and ICQ (Oscar protocol), MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, IRC, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, SILC, Novell GroupWise Messenger, Lotus Sametime, and Zephyr networks.

For the longest time I had been using an older version of AIM with DeadAIM, and was happy with it. A friend asked me to get OTR so that he could privately chat while at work, and since I didn’t feel like installing an OTR proxy and running that in the background I decided to just switch to gaim. Gaim 1.5 is the “current” release, but it has some major annoyances that have been fixed in 2.0 beta3.

One of the major reasons that I never switched to gaim or trillian before was because I like to use the ctrl+# shortcuts to insert smilies. I like smilies, but never really learned how to type them because I only use them in AIM and well, I am too lazy. Ask me what # a smiley is and I know, but how to actually type it? no clue. Gaim 1.5 had an option where you could turn ctrl+# smilies on, but it disappeared in gaim2 much to my dismay.

I use trillian at work, and it is okay, but it also does not have the ctrl+# shortcuts, and they were a must for a messenger that I use at home. Since Gaim is Open Source, I figured if they removed it there had to be a way I could add it back.

this is my story of improving gaim…

First thing I did was enable the extra smilies that trillian has that come from the other messaging clients

That was as simply as editing the smiley theme file located at
C:\Program Files\Gaim\pixmaps\gaim\smileys\default

my modified file can be viewed here

what I basically did was comment out the code that says the other icons are only for MSN, and then comment out the smilies that overlapped
now onto the more important part, making the ctrl+# shortcuts work

the easiest way to accomplish the shortcuts is to use keybindings in the GTK libraries that gaim uses. It took a while to figure out where to put the file, but with some hints on format from gaims sample gtkrc and the smileys already in txt format from my theme file, I made this new and improved gtkrc file that binds the ctrl+# keys to the smilies.

there seems to be an issue with the ctrl+shift+# smileys, so I changed it to ctrl+alt+# for the second 8 smilies.

I also added the additional smilies (K) and (L) to ctrl+9 and ctrl+0 for conversations with people that I want to kiss. (they need to be using trillian or a gaim modified like mine to see them)

So… You have this new gtkrc file, but where does it go? with the help of the gaim FAQ I put the new gtkrc file in C:\Documents and Settings\username\.themes\Default\gtk-2.0\gtkrc and relaunched gaim. Boom! smiley shortcuts work!

(on a side note, the .themes folder probably doesn’t exist, and you cannot make it from the GUI of windows so you have to “mkdir .themes” from a dos prompt)