Disabling smiley icons in Conversations (PR1.2)

If you're one of those old-school geeks who simply can't stand these quasi-cool, graphical equivalents of good old, ascii-based smileys (aka emoticons like ":-)" or ";)"), this tip is going to make your day. Conversations app which manages all sorts of text and IM messages in your N900 is using graphical smileys by default, yet the new and shiny PR1.2 release brings much anticipated ability to hack those weird icons and bring some old ascii love back to N900 near you.

All you have to do is edit /usr/share/rtcom-messaging-ui/smilies/user/default.def file and remove all lines under [Smilies] section. Same might be applied to /usr/share/rtcom-messaging-ui/smilies/service/skype.def (or basically any *.def file within those directories). The next step is reboot and you have graphical-simley-less device in your hand. Hell yeah!

On the other hand, for those who actually love these ugly icons, *.def files allow to create mappings for new smiley icons, so for example you could assign "sad" icon to ":)" smiley just for fun. I didn't try that, tough, for obvious reasons.

Thanks to Nokian Mikhail Zabaluev for providing that hack.