Geek Goddess

As of the release of 4.3, WordPress removed the “Formatting” section from the Writing settings. Included in there was the option to turn off WordPress’s default action to convert text emoticons to image smilies. This plugin does the same thing as unchecking the “convert to smilies” box that used to be available via the settings.

Keep Emoticons as Text

Disables the default WordPress option of converting emoticons to image smilies

brokenlibrarian

SimpleSmileyShow is a plugin that takes whatever smilies are currently defined and displays them in a row just before the comment textarea on any page with comments. Clicking on the smilies will insert the code for that smiley into the textarea at the position of the cursor. No configuration is required.
The smilies can be adjusted with CSS; each clickable smiley has the class wp-smileylink and the block containing them has the ID wp-smileyblock.
This plugin is designed to work with the WordPress 3 style of comment pages which use comment_form() and have the actions comment_form_after_fields, comment_form_logged_in_after, and comment_form_must_log_in_after present. (This should be the majority of modern themes.) This plugin does not work with the Jetpack plugin if the new comment system is enabled, since it replaces the normal comment_form() completely.
This plugin uses JQuery and the jquery.insertatcaret plugin. It has been tested tested with the twentyten through twentyfourteen themes.
Development on this plugin has halted. Other developers should feel free to use the Apache-licensed code for their own projects.
http://brokenlibrarian.org/tinyplugins/ 
brokenlibrarian@gmail.com 
09/28/14
<h3>License</h3>
Copyright 2014 Christian Wagner
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the “License”); 
 you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. 
 You may obtain a copy of the License at
<pre><code> http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
</code></pre>
Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software 
 distributed under the License is distributed on an “AS IS” BASIS, 
 WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. 
 See the License for the specific language governing permissions and 
 limitations under the License.

SimpleSmileyShow

SimpleSmileyShow is a plugin that takes whatever smilies are currently defined and displays them in a row just before the comment textarea on any page …

Keep Emoticons as Text vs SimpleSmileyShow