I use text smileys and emoticons a lot and so do people who send me texts. The only problem is the ones we use are different from the built-in ones, and the built-in substutions cause problems:

- Many emoticons are mangled because part (recognised by the software) becomes an icon and the rest stays as punctuation.

- Can't tell what I've been sent because several sequences map to the same icon.

- Can't tell how what I'm about to send will appear at the other end because of the above point.

- With some of the less obvious icons from the smiley menu, you can't see how they will appear on other phones that don't do smiley images or don't have the same set of matching character sequences.

E.g. me and my friends use :-) ¡-o |-O |-o ¡-) for a yawn and :-)x(-:* for a kiss, and both are somewhat messy when half-converted to icons.

And because and :-) both become the same icon, and the same for :-o and :-O, and you can't delete individual characters once they have become an icon, there's no way to be sure what you typed.

I'd be happiest with the smiley feature if:

a. I could define my own set of text patterns and matching smileys.

b. It had the option to show, in small text accompanying the icon, the text that has expanded into the icon.

I'm also thinking that some IM protocols have their own standardised smiley matchers, which Conversations ought to be using for messages on those services.

Some IM protocols support user-defined smiley images being sent over the protocol, which is quite nice when it works (if you like smiley images).

umm, how? I just want to change the smileys... from :-) to and so on. So I basically have the same problem as others do, that do like smileys, but just different ones

But Nokia have UI experts that decided that everyone wants this magnificent feature, so no much chance of them giving you an option to disable it.

Well as te backend is telepathy I'm still hoping there'll be an alternative UI for this.

Smileys are cool! stop complaining

Indeed Arif, I love the smileys on the N900, and never complained about them! =)

one thing everybody will be happy about:
i managed to contact the rtcom-team (which is responsible for the whole look of the message-views).
(i asked if i'm allowed to modify and upload some files because of copyright-issues and they answered AND give us a closer look at the future of messaging on the n900 ^^) here's the statement:
http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...9&postcount=31

That's great, but I'd still like overall customization, really like the yahoo smileys
Where are the pictures located?

that's the interesting part of the content:
and the smileys are placed in /usr/share/icons/$res/hildon/ and named "chat_smiley_$name.png".

where $res is 16x16, 24x24, 48x48 and even 216x216 (but this only for avatar-replacement).

$name is (as you can already see in the hex-code) lips, surprised, angry, happy, tongue, frustrated, sad, worried, nerd, wink, sleepy, veryhappy.

so you can replace the images and edit the string when they are loaded.

EDIT:
summation: it's possible to have your own smileys and even your own strings for smileys.

EDIT2:
i wonder what would happen if you replace the smiley strings with . (hex: 00). would this break the whole thing or would this disable all the smiley replacement? ^^

EDIT3:
if you don't want to see any smileys at all (neither strings nor images) and/or don't want to mess around with a hex editor... you could edit the smsconversation.css and set the smiley-size to 0x0 px

since that annoyed me all the time since i got my n900, and since i don't see any solution to this annoying problem, i'd like to share with you what i found out in the depths of the interwebs:

https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7127#c13

this really works fine for me, and i'm really really really thankfull that my eyes got not distracted by a bunch of colored pixels