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

Jeff Waugh

Replace the blocky default (GIF) smilies with beautiful Tango/GNOME (PNG) smilies.
If you want to use this plugin with a version of WordPress prior to 2.8, please use version 2.0.

Tango/GNOME Smilies

Replace the blocky default (GIF) smilies with beautiful Tango/GNOME (PNG) smilies.

Keep Emoticons as Text vs Tango/GNOME Smilies