In the past we’ve covered Gmail Chat—and its emoticons in particular. Of course everyone who uses Gmail knows it now supports smileys in email, but there have been a couple minor changes for the chat smileys too.

First, there is a new category in the smiley chat popup that has alternate renderings of the graphics.

Also, there is a new robot smiley, [:|], that was left here today in a comment by “Pat.” Thanks, Pat. Are there any more new ones?

Okay, kids. The “poo” is now included, thanks to an anonymous comment posted on the article, New Gmail Chat Smilies. Or, maybe it’s a beehive. Whatever.

List of All Gmail Chat Emoticons

So, given the robot and that there is now a new category, and especially since the partial lists in prior articles, here is the complete list of Gmail Chat Smileys.

(This image seems to have been lifted and posted elsewhere. If you use post this elsewhere, please provide a link back to this article.)

If any are missing, be sure to leave them in a comment.

Update: For a complete list of Gmail chat emoticons, including the new category four smileys and the new robot and poo smileys see Gmail Chat Smileys.

With the recent update to Gmail chat, Google has added (both round and squared) graphic smilies. What’s more, some new hidden smilies are showing up.

Old-timey smilies are still the default.

The standard old-timey animated text smilies are still very popular amongst quite a few Gmail users, and are still the default set. Now you can view them in the smiley popup window (accessible from the lower right corner of the chat window).

Of course this window does not show the hidden smilies, which are detailed below.

New round and square faces are now available.

Now, however, you can switch to rounded yellow and squared yellow smiley faces by clicking the appropriate tab in the smiley popup window.

What do you think of these new smilies? Twelve standard emoticons in three flavors. Wow. Kind of underwhelming.

What a fancy smiley interface you have.

Popups. Tabs. Well, the new smilies do add a bit of color to chat sessions, but they feel kind of limited compared to, say, Yahoo emoticons. The tabbed popup interface seems a bit complicated just to select from the twelve standard emoticons.

Along those lines, the difference between the original faces and the round yellow faces is pretty stark, but between yellow round and yellow square is awfully small. Really, why bother? Has there been a serious clamoring for square smiley faces? It would be better to include Japanese smilies (face marks), like (-_-).

Hidden Gmail Chat Emoticons

Though sporting such a limited set of standard smilies, Gmail chat redeems itself by including some hidden emoticons. A slew of them turned up in comments to our Gmail Chat Fun article from last year.

The original hidden emoticons are still there. The equalizers ( =/ =( =p ), wince ( >.< ), the monkey ( |) ), the devil ( }:-) ), the heart (<3 ), and the ever-popular more cowbell ( +/’\ ).

But now some new hidden emoticons are showing up. The heart is becomes a broken heart if you put a slash through it ( </3 ). The kiss face is here ( :* ) as well as an alternate ( ). And, oddly enough, a crab has appeared ( V.v.V ).

Update: as ev noted in the comments, there is also a pig. :)

Update 2: and Crystal points out a mustached man. :{

Update 3: added the alternate kiss face.

Update 4: added the robot and poo smileys. [:|] and ~@~

All of the hidden emoticons have their filled-in versions as well. Check out that monkey.

Have you found any others? If so, post them here.

Suggestions For The Gmail Chat Developers

First up, the hidden emoticons. You have the devil, so why not the angel or halo emoticon? O:) Really, it only seems right. Also, the chicken. ~:> Why on earth is there no chicken in the menagerie? You have monkeys and crabs, but no chickens?

Second, there is a UI design issue here. Take a look at that smiley interface. It’s nice and gets the job done, but something about it is just out of whack. You have three tabs on a popup panel on the popup chat window, but a dearth of smilies grace each tab. However, the big problem here is the similarity between the round and square faces. It’s like you give us the option of a pogo stick or a light gray rocket or a dull silver rocket. How about original smilies, yellow round smilies, and Japanese facemarks? Now that would be cool. And it would balance the choices a bit.

Overall, a welcome upgrade

The new smilies are welcome, the gee-whiz interface is okay — but it makes us a bit hungry for more tweaks and enhancements.

Gmail Super Clean is a Greasemonkey script that renders a cleaner Gmail experience. Aside from the snazzy white interface, it removes the Gmail bookmark links, AdSense ads, tweaks the fonts, and slaps a groovy icon up top.

Gmail Super Clean Options

What’s more, under Tools->Greasemonkey->UserScript Commands, there are options to enable and disable the custom logo, the ads, the Google account bookmarks, change the font and font size. It even gives you the option to use a custom logo image.

Of course, Firefox only, and you must have Greasemonkey installed.

In addition to the standard Gmail Chat emoticons listed in a previous article here, some hidden smilies have turned up.

Whatchamuhcallit

They’ve added a cool equal, slantmouthy face =/.

Yeeesh, That Had To Hurt

If you wince, you need this one. >.<

Is Google Evil?

The Devil made them do it. }:-)

Pretty snazzy, and I wonder if similar ones exist. With a devil emoticon in the mix, an angel or halo would be cool. At least I hope there’s more reason for good over bad.

I got a fever and the only prescription is more cowbell.

More Cowbell! +/’\ is a great addition. See the video here.

Update: The cowbell +/’\ has been fixed. Tae Yang points out in a comment (not posted as it was left without a correct email address) that the cowbell emoticon was incorrect. WordPress converted the apostrophe to a right single quote. The correct cowbell is (plus) (slash) (apostrophe) (backslash). Thanks Tae. Leave your email next time.

First saw =/ and >.< in a comment here, then dug up more here.

Update: There are several new smileys, including the robot [:|] and the “poo” ~@~ thing. Check out the full list of Gmail chat emoticons.

Same goes for other configuration or settings files. For instance, connection strings in web.config files (connection string file:web.config), Movable Type passwords (file:mt-db-pass.cgi), keygen name serial, backdoor passwords (backdoor.*password), MySQL root passwords (file:config.inc.php “MySQL password” root, etc.

Of course, one could search for code vulerable to cross-site scripting, SQL Injection (lang:php mysql_query\(.*\$_(GET|POST|COOKIE|REQUEST).*\)), remote code execution (lang:php (include|require)\s*(\(|\s).*\$_(GET|POST)), header injection, and on and on.

Spammers can cull email addresses from code with a simple code search as well ([a-z]*@[a-z]*.com)

So what have we learned?

• Do not put passwords in public code, including zipped code archives.
• Be more diligent to protect against SQL Injection and similar exploits. I.e. do not trust user input of any sort.
• Do not put email addresses in public code.
• In general, keep your eyes and ears open for security exploits and protect against them.

We can’t be perfect, but we ought to try.

Seen here, here, and here.

You can limit the results to languages (lang:), particular licenses (license:), files (file:), and packages (package:). Regular expressions are supported as well.

Language support appears to be limited to the following: Ada, ASP, Assembly, Basic, C, C++, C#, Eiffel, Erlang, Fortran, Java, JavaScript, JSP, Lex, Limbo, Lisp, Lua, Makefile, Mathematica, Matlab, Objective C, Perl, PHP, PostScript, Python, Ruby, Scheme, Shell, Smalltalk, SQL, Tcl, Troff, and Yacc. Wonder why no COBOL, SNOBOL, PL1, Pascal, JCL, etc.? Besides “they’re old languages.” Unfortunately, not everyone is hip and happening, and programmers struggling to support old systems are likely to need a good resource like this. Google, can you add some languages?

Anyhow, support for regular expressions is welcome. The licenses you can use in the searches include: Aladdin Public License, Artistic License, Apache License, Apple Public Source License, BSD License, Common Public License, GNU General Public License, GNU Lesser General Public License, Historical Permission Notice and Disclaimer, IBM Public License, Lucent Public License, MIT License, Mozilla Public License, NASA Open Source Agreement, Python Software Foundation License, Q Public License, Sleepycat License, and the Zope Public License.

Some example searches:

• blowfish lang:javascript
• obfuscate lang:php
• screen.*scrape lang:c
• file:\.js$ sneaky
• find.*path lang:c++ -license:gpl

Seen here.

Currently Gmail Chat does not support formatting like Yahoo or others do. But there are some things you can do to spice up the experience, such as it is. Some of this applies to Gtalk, some doesn’t.
Previously, we’ve covered bold, italics, and special characters (like ♫♥☼). We also noted that Google added an incoming-chat sound and the ability to add a picture to a Gmail contact.

However, here are some more Gmail Chat features.

To recap the text formatting…

Italics – you can surround text with an underscore (“_”) to italicize it. For example “_this_ is important” displays as “this is important”

Bold – if you surround text with astericks (“*”) it will display as bold. “*This* is important” displays as “this is important”

Update (6/6/2009): Strike through – surround text with hypens (“-”) to cross it out. “-This- is crossed out” will display as “This is crossed out”.

Special Characters

You can copy-paste special characters from charmap (in Windows) or another character map application or website into your messages. Try copy-pasting any of the following characters into a Gmail chat window (or status, see below):
Whoops! A WordPress upgrade somehow munged these characters. I’ll work on recreating.

Status

If any of your Gmail contacts are online, they can be displayed to the left of the browser window, with an icon and chat status message displayed as well. Contact status icons can be either grey, red, orange, or green indicating that the contact is offline, busy, idle, or online and available (respectively).

However, if the contact has set a status message, it will be displayed below the contact name. This status message can also be formatted (bold and/or italic) and can include special characters. For example, you might use ♫♪ to indicate the obvious.

Further, you can include a domain in your status and it will hyperlink automatically. Type techrageo.us as your status and it becomes techrageo.us all by itself.

Emoticons

Gmail’s Chat has slick little animated emoticons. No, not the ubiquitous yellow smiley faces, but a clever modern take on the original text emoticons.

And no, unfortunately the emoticons don’t work in the status messages. Come on, Google. I can \m/ rock out in chat, but I have to ♫♪ in my status message. Oh, well, I guess that’s okay.

Gmail Integration

Say you receive an email and want to send a quick reply. If the person to whom you’re replying is online, you can also reply to their email message via chat.

Also, your chat history is saved. On the left side of the Gmail browser window, a couple items below Inbox is Chats. Click that to get a history of your chats. If you “Go Offline with…” a contact, that chat is not saved. Also, you can turn off the feature that saves chats.

Other Resources

Gmail Chat Help is a good overview of the features