[vidarh]

I think that's a fundamental difference in working style. I never write multiple emails at once, nor have I wanted to. To me that is clutter.

The "pop out" choice is a poor one since it turns Compose into 3 operations: Press compose, press the pop-out button, press maximize on the new window.

(as for the chat box, I use Minimalist, and my Gmail UI is trimmed of anything extraneous).

[thezilch]

Just hit "d" -- first have shortcuts enabled.

[vidarh]

Yes, I found that out in this thread. It's still a worse experience, though, as it's much slower.