You can use emoticons in google chat and they will be replaced with little animations as soon as you hit send. You can also use bold, italics, strike through, or any combination of them.

The only useful text chat is the friendly team chat. The public chat that defaults to the ‘t’ button is useless. The only thing you’ll see there is whining, complaining, and other types of spam. I found it not only useless and annoying, but distracting sometimes. 1/20th of all text is team chat, so it’s much less intrusive. Everything in the configuration file I describe below is user interface stuff. There’s no hacks or cheats available here.