Customizing the Instant Messaging client PSI

The default InstantMessaging client at GSI is Psi. Its appearance is highly customizable, so you can choose the colors, icons, and emoticons that suit you best. Take a look at the Psi homepage.

There are a lot of icon and emoticon packages available for Psi, please use you favourite search engine to find them.

You may also create your own icon set by putting icon files in a directory, write a description in the file icondef.xml, compress the folder with zip and rename it from .zip to .jisp.

Installation for Psi 0.14

To install the icon packages for Psi 0.14 you will have to place them in subfolders of your ~/.psi directory:

1. Create the corresponding subdirectory in your personal ~/.psi folder:
   mkdir ~/.psi/iconsets (for icon sets)
   mkdir -p ~/.psi/iconsets/emoticons (for emoticon sets)
2. Download the icon package and copy (or move) it to the correct folder:
   cp some_icon_set.jisp ~/.psi/iconsets (for icon sets)
   cp some_emoticon_set.jisp ~/.psi/iconsets/emoticons (for emoticon sets)
3. The new icon sets should be available without restarting Psi, just right click on the Psi tray icon (a yellow star by default), choose "Psi" and submenu "Options". Now you can activate the desired set simply by highlighting it.

Installation for Psi 0.15

To install the icon packages for Psi 0.15 you will have to place them in subfolders of your ~/.local directory:

1. Create the corresponding subdirectory in your personal ~/.local/share/psi folder:
   mkdir ~/.local/share/psi/iconsets (for icon sets)
   mkdir -p ~/.local/share/psi/iconsets/emoticons (for emoticon sets)
2. Download the icon package and copy (or move) it to the correct folder:
   cp some_icon_set.jisp ~/.local/share/psi/iconsets (for icon sets)
   cp some_emoticon_set.jisp ~/.local/share/psi/iconsets/emoticons (for emoticon sets)
3. The new icon sets should be available after restarting Psi, just right click on the Psi tray icon (a yellow star by default), choose "Psi" and submenu "Options". Now you can activate the desired set simply by highlighting it.

Some useful hints

• If your chat partner has installed different emoticon packages, in some cases only the "source code" of the icon will be displayed (e. g. something like <zakupy> instead of a smiley with a caddy).
• If you select more than one emoticon set the order of the packages is important. The emoticon :-) is probably part of any emoticon package, so the graphic will be taken from the first active set.