Gajim without automatic emoticons / 2017-03-25

For some circles I am active in the chat system of choice is jabber because it can be setup to demand encrypted links and has a nice array of client software which can deal with one client replacing the connection of another.

So I found gajim as client software for linux. But gajim has the habit of automatically changing text emoticons to images. I don't like that, if someone types (bf888) I want to see that and not have the last 8) replaced by an image of an emoticon with glasses.

Searching for a solution found Emoticons - Wiki gajim/gajim which states:

You are free, however, to disable emoticons completely, if you find them disturbing.

But no information on how to disable them all. I found in the advanced settings the option emoticons_theme which points at subdirs of /usr/share/gajim/data/emoticons in my installation (ubuntu). So I created a directory none with none/emoticons.py containing:

# coding=utf-8
emoticons = {
        'doesnotexist.png': ['fDpK6OGDFCCLmq5MNjihfpjZuLontjkWp5XG5V7wTIAVXwaJ'],
}

Leaving the list empty with just {} gave an error. My python knowledge is nonexistant so I took this shortcut.

And now a :-) stays a :-) as I wanted.