Focus reply

Long conversations are hard to answer from a small composer — you scroll up to re-read, lose your place, scroll back down, and repeat. Focus reply opens your reply in a near-fullscreen canvas: your draft on the left with room to breathe, the conversation on the right, read-only and scrolled to the latest message.

Opening the canvas

What you get

• The full composer, decompressed. Everything the in-thread composer can do is here — rich text formatting, the AI writing menu, attachments, Cc/Bcc, Reply / Reply all, schedule send, and Save draft — laid out with a larger subject line, a roomier toolbar, and an editor that fills the canvas.
• The conversation beside your draft. The right pane shows the thread's recent messages — texts as chat bubbles, emails with their subject and full formatting — newest at the bottom. Scroll up to load earlier history.
• Reply to a specific message. Use a message's Reply action in the conversation pane to anchor your reply on that exact message; the anchor chip above the editor updates in place.
• Your sending lines, unchanged. The Sending to / Sending from pickers and the reply-target selector sit above the editor and stay in sync with the thread view — it's the same reply, on the same lines.

One draft, two surfaces

The canvas and the in-thread composer are two views over the same draft. Type in one, close it, and the other shows every word — including attachments and Cc/Bcc changes. Reply drafts keep auto-saving while you write (the Draft saved pill carries over), so closing the canvas — or the whole thread — never loses anything. See Drafts.

Closing and sending

• Esc or the collapse button returns you to the thread with your draft intact in the inline composer.
• Send works exactly as it does in the thread — the canvas closes and your message lands in the conversation immediately.