Reply text box as alternative to current button approach

[oshyan (Oshyan Greene)]

Continuing the discussion from How difficult would it be to make the Discourse UI more like Flarum?:
I’d like to suggest we have the option for…

@oshyan

a more obvious text box-like “reply” area, which I think is a nice alternative to the “Reply” button:

Notice how this is more than just a possibly “easier” or more “frictionless”-looking reply approach. The addition of the avatar image already there is actually an interesting detail that I personally think encourages interaction because it subtly makes you feel like you’re already involved.

I’d be curious if others agree with my armchair psychoanalysis of how this alternative approach feels and what behavior it may encourage or discourage in average users.

Note that this “text box” really acts kind of like a button in Flarum. So I am not suggesting a radical change to how the composer works. The outline of the text box appears on-hover, and your cursor turns into a text caret, but when you click into the “text box” it opens a full Compose window with the topic title as normal:

Flarum works a bit differently for preview than Discourse (and Discourse is superior in this regard IMO), but basically a Discourse version of this would just move the avatar up to the header, and open the two pane editor as normal where you see the single pane in the Flarum example above. And it wouldn’t necessarily have to work fully as Flarum does, e.g. the text caret appearing, that seems more complicated. Just the design as inspiration is what I’m wanting to highlight and discuss.