That would be easier if the reply box was bigger than the address window on an envelope.
It's like the bad old days of trying to use the Eclipse IDE where most of your screen real estate is taken up with tabs and buttons and you only get a narrow 5x80 window on the world.
Except that in this case instead of the screen being taken up with masses of widgets, it is consumed with vast tracts of whitespace. Good job there, PG.
(Actually, if PG had anything to do with it, I suspect it is a well thought out policy which results because he doesn't like long conversations (possibly a signal to noise bias against long posts?) consider also that there is no easy way to quote the parent, which just wastes bandwidth anyway)
