Hey there. I've continued to hack on our internal Zulip install to meet our users' needs, and I've worked out a few things that we find useful, but I'm not sure if they're appropriate for upstream. I'd like some feedback on if any of them would be worth PRing.

• I've added a user option to make the compose box show persistently, rather than collapsing into the "Drafts/Reply/New Topic" line. When on, this causes the compose pane to always remain open. The "close" action instead blurs the compose box, putting the user back into command mode. Focusing the window focuses the edit box, so tabbing into your chat window has you immediately ready to start replying. Switching to a new stream prepopulates the topic with the most recently discussed topic in the channel. This is effectively how the mobile app behaves, and is just more comfortable for people coming from stuff like Slack. The biggest complaint I've heard is that chatting feels like an extra step; this fixes it, but it does make some assumptions about Zulip usage that might not be compatible with the product design.
• I've reduced the amount of whitespace at the bottom of the messages list. The current behavior feels like you're scrolling "past" the most recent messages. By changing this, it doesn't feel jarring to scroll down to the bottom of the feed. I coupled this with a change which auto-scrolls the message pane to the bottom when a) the scroll height changes, and b) the user was previously at the bottom of the feed. This fixes issues like images taking a bit to load, then causing the stream to "jump up" from the user's perspective.
• Along with the above, I made a change to auto-scroll the message pane to the bottom of the feed when you reply, rather than showing the "Scroll down to see your reply" message; this is consistent with how other chat apps work.

I realize that some of these changes may not be in line with the intentional design of Zulip, but I wanted to at least offer them, since they've been some of the more common points of friction as we try to transition people to Zulip. Any feedback would be welcome.