The "emoticons" of old, :), :D, :|, and their nose-inclusive variants, and the rest of their head-tilted school (for we are not here discussing the upright "o_O", etc.), these have died, Facebook and others have killed them, finally, for the many, these evocative agglomerations of symbols and letters, appropriated from their conventional uses and taught the unfamiliar science of standing for a face which, monospaced in their early youth, golden in the heyday of USENET, engaged the ingenuity of their authors and the creativity of their beholders alike, the paucity of detail found in their poor materials enabling a richness of interpretation paradoxical only to the foolish who, in obedience to the unintelligible demands of an incomprehensible system, have sought, with increasing success, to replace the vague (yet, oddly, literal), rough, and popular with the concrete, graphical, and centralized, the unruly ferment of unbounded textual combination and novel recombination with selection from a pre-chosen set of cartoonish faces, the open, in a small-scale reproduction of the fate of the Internet generally, with the closed.
Anymore, that is, when you type a good old-fashioned smiley :) :) :) :), you're apt to see it replaced by some grody circular abomination. They're abominable because they replace the schematic and suggestive text icons with relatively more concrete graphics which allow less interpretive freedom and less playfulness, and less creativity. (It's also inconsistent across platforms, with (e.g.) both Facebook and Hipchat replacing :| with a face with its mouth a straight line, but only the former replacing :/ with anything.) You might not think that a yellow circle with horizontally disposed eyes and a horizontal line for a mouth would be less evocative and more concrete in what it does evoke than the vertically disposed eyes and vertical line for a mouth of ":|", but such, I report, is my experience; the different graphical realizations of the nonplussed face suggest in each case something different, but they each suggest something particular, in contrast to the flexibility of the spare original.
The plain-text emoticons have the further advantage over the graphical that anyone typing text can type them, and add to or change them; I'm not sure precisely what :B might convey, but I can still use it (and have); if I want to indicate that I'm so surprised I'm vomiting exclamation points, I can employ ":O !!!". It's an open field.
These pleasures can be enjoyed once again, with the emote script
herein to be found, which takes a single commandline argument and
copies into a clipboard, except with a zero-width space between each
character [1]. If pbcopy can be found, it will use that; otherwise,
it will use xclip (regardless of whether it can be found! ha!),
using the clipboard selection (which allows the contents to be
pasted using ctrl-V, rather than the middle mouse button). I use this
with dmenu on linux and (so far) just from the terminal on osx, but
I'm sure there's a convenient way to use it there too.
Regrettably, since many of the most emotional characters on the keyboard are also special to the shell, usability takes a bit of a hit; one must type:
emote ':|'
rather than:
emote :|
But such is our sublunary world.
[1] Or rather, between each whatever-it-is that one iterates through when iterating through unicode in Python.