Pidgin to Adium Emoticon Theme Converter

A friend of mine—who happens to be a Mac user—wanted to use the default Pidgin emoticon theme with Adium. Being built on libpurple, I expected Adium to support the format out of the box, but I was wrong. It requires that the index file be a Mac OS X property list, which is an improvement over Pidgin’s flat files, but an abomination in terms of semantic XML.

Anyway, I came up with a quick-and-dirty converter. Obviously, since I wrote it, it’s a Perl script.

: Untitled by laihiu
Some rights reserved

You can download the script for free. Run it with:

perl pidgin2adium.pl theme_path [set1 set2 …]

The theme_path is the path to the emoticon theme you’d like to convert. You’ll find it under pixmaps/pidgin/emotes/.
The optional list of sets specifies which sets you’d like to convert. The default theme, for instance, defines emoticons for all sorts of protocols, and I just wanted the default set and the one for MSN Messenger.
To sum up, for my purposes, I used the command:

perl pidgin2adium.pl "C:\Program Files\Pidgin\pixmaps\pidgin\emotes\default" default MSN

The script creates a zip file named after the theme (in my case Default.zip) in the working directory. If no zip file was created, the script will have died with an error. No output means everything was hunky dory.

Comments on This Post

Says peter, roughly 2 years and 2 months ago:

Hey, it still works but on a mac it creates an empty folder called Default.AdiumEmoticonset and a zip file Default.zip. I think the content of the zip file belongs in that folder. Otherwise its an empty iconset.
Says Tim, roughly 2 years and 2 months ago:

Hmm, the folder shouldn’t be empty. Is there more stuff in the zip file than in the folder? Their contents should match. If they’re both empty, I guess something else went wrong.
Says Tom, roughly 1 year and 9 months ago:

It still works,

like peter says, it produces two files. One is an empty emoticon file and one is a zip archive. To make it work you have to extract the zip archive and copy the content to /Users/<your_user>/Library/Application Support/Adium 2.0/Emoticons and then it should appear as selection in Adium. Thank you for your work