Yahoo! Messenger Emotions

What are Emotions?

Yahoo! Messenger emotes are used for storing your emotions, or commonly used text/links etc... I personally use information for storing helpful links. Yahoo! Messenger comes with a set of emotions, which to be honest, are boring!

Two Emote Files

There are two emote files within the Yahoo! Messenger folder
emote_user.dat - This is where your custom emotions are intended to go. There is a very brief instruction on how the emotes should be formed!
emote.dat - This is the pre written emotions as distributed with Yahoo! Messenger. Editing this file is not dangerous, so feel free to edit or delete the Yahoo! ones too! In this tutorial, we will use emote_user.dat as the example, but it applies 100% to the emote.dat files too.

Opening the emote files

Open the file: "c:\program files\yahoo!\messenger\emote_user.dat" in notepad. I say notepad, because it will not add formatting codes to your emote files, which would make it uesless.
It tries to open with X program instead
Sometimes .dat programs are associated with other programs, often inappropriate programs like media player, read the question below for a solution.
It asks what to open with...
There are a few ways you can do this, choose one:
1 Open from within notepad. Use start>>run, type notepad, and press ok. Then use File>>Open... to navigate to the file.
2 Associate .dat files with notepad. Use My Computer, or Windows Explorer to navigate to the "c:\program files\yahoo!\messenger\" folder. Then left click the emote_user.dat ONCE. Then hold down shift on the keyboard, then click it with your right mouse button ONCE. THen select "Open With...". Choose notepad, and you can check the box at the bottom to always open with...
3 From start>>run, pass the filename as the paramater in the following way: "notepad "C:\program files\yahoo!\messenger\emote_user.dat"" and press OK

Format of an emotion, and creating one!

The emotion is formatted in the following way:

EmoteName\Room Text\Personal Text

EmoteName - This is the name of the emotion.
Room Text - This is the text that will be displayed when the emote is directed towards the room.
Personal Text - This is the text that will be displayed when the emote is directed at a specific user, by selecting "Emote User". You can use a variable in here, "%s". Place it where you would like the user's name to appear, for example:

Dances\Dances around the room\Dances around the room with %s

If you select this emote, without choosing emote user, "Dances around the room" is posted to the room. If you choose emote user, the %s in the personal response is swapped with the user's ID.
Therefore to add an emotion, just add something similar to the above!

Delete an emotion

To delete an emotion, just delete the line it occupies!

Edit an emotion

To edit an emotion, just make the required changes!

Tools

There are some other tools to aid this process!
Wingdings If you would like to use small images such as Y this page tells you how: Webdings Emotes
Emotion Share Download examples of, and use other peoples emotions. If you've created your own, you can put yours there: Emotion Share
Emotion Creator Use a Grahical Program to create new emotions easily, no problems opening the file, no problems getting the format right: Emotion Creator