Replace default smileys menu

Question

1. I want to replace the default smileys menu (the one that shows up when the smiley button on the virtual keyboard is pressed) with a custom one with own drawables. Is this even possible?

2. If not, is there any way to get access to the smartphone's default smiley drawables so I can show them in my textview?

I'd love to use my own ones though. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

1. No. Not without making your own keyboard. Which you can do of course. Part of the reason that this is a no is that each keyboard does smilies on its own, so they all have different ones.

2. You can put any image you want in a textview - just use an ImageSpan. Android doesn't really have default emoticons (although an OEM may use a consistent set across pre-installed apps). Either keyboards will insert their own emoticons via image spans, or apps will see a familiar pattern like :-) in the text and convert it into an image span. If you want the images from the default android keyboard you can find those in the AOSP somewhere, or by unzipping the apk file.