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Tuesday, October 6, 2015

How To Install Facebook (And Others) Emoticons In Pidgin [Quick Tip]

Quick tip: If you're using the new Facebook Chat plugin for Pidgin, you may want to add support for Facebook's official emoticons, so here's how to do it.

To add Facebook (including secret) emoticons to Pidgin, you can use pidgin-EAP, a project which provides emoticon themes for most available protocols, including Facebook. The pack even contains some sound and buddy list themes.

To install pidgin-EAP emoticon themes in Linux, use the following commands in a terminal:

cd /tmp
wget https://github.com/Hernou/pidgin-EAP/archive/master.tar.gz
tar -xvf master.tar.gz
cp -rf pidgin-EAP-master/{.fonts,.purple} ~

Or, if you want to install it manually, go to the pidgin-EAP GitHub page, click "Download ZIP" on the right, extract the zip and copy its contents to your home directory (note that the zip contains two hidden ".fonts" and ".purple" folders so you'll have to use Ctrl + H in your file manager to see them).

For Windows, see the instructions available on GitHub.

Then, open Pidgin, from its menu select Tools > Preferences and on the Themes tab select "EAP" under "Smiley Theme":

This will use pidgin-EAP's custom smilies for all the protocols it supports. If you only want this for Faceook, select "Facebook" from the drop-down instead.

Use Facebook Chat In Pidgin With Purple-Facebook

Facebook shut down their XMPP service earlier this year and because of this, Pidgin/libpurple no longer supports Facebook Chat. For those of you who want to use Facebook Chat in Pidgin, there's a new plugin which makes this possible, called purple-facebook.

The plugin has been in development for about two months and is still a work in progress, but it is already functional and most things work as expected, including opening existing group chats and creating new ones.

According to its wiki, the Facebook Chat plugin is already implemented for the development version of libpurple, purple3, which has yet to be released and the purple-facebook project is a backport of the purple3 plugin to purple2, the released version of libpurple which is used by Pidgin and other clients.

The reasons for using this plugin instead of a stand-alone Facebook Chat alternative are having all the messaging protocols in one place and of course, the tight desktop integration provided by Pidgin, such as native desktop notifications, taskbar alerts, Unity Launcher unread count and Messaging Menu support (for the Unity features to work, make sure the Unity Integration plugin is enabled in Pidgin).

At the time I'm writing this article, the plugin doesn't support chat/friend additions or removals, but these are on the todo list. Some more advanced features like link previews or stickers are also not supported.

Install purple-facebook in Ubuntu, Linux Mint and derivatives

To install purple-facebook in Ubuntu, Linux Mint and derivatives, you can use its official repository. To add the repository and install the plugin, use the following commands:

sudo sh -c "echo 'deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/jgeboski/xUbuntu_$(lsb_release -rs)/ /' >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/jgeboski.list"
cd /tmp && wget  http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/jgeboski/xUbuntu_$(lsb_release -rs)/Release.key
sudo apt-key add - < Release.key  
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install purple-facebook

If you don't want to add the PPA, you can download the DEB from HERE (but you won't receive any updates unless you add the repository). Or, grab the source and build it yourself.

Arch Linux users can install purple-facebook via AUR. On Windows, follow the instructions from HERE.

Once installed, add a new account in Pidgin (Accounts > Manage Accounts > Add) and in the Protocol dropdown, select "Facebook" (important: NOT "Facebook (XMPP)"):

I should also mention that in the username field, you can enter either your emil, your Facebook username or phone number associated with your Facebook account.

Report any bugs you may find @ GitHub.

If you're a Pidgin user, also see:

plugin seen @ HumanOS