I would definitely be in favour of a wider textarea to edit my posts. Having said that, is it actually the sidebar that's limiting the width?

I've long had this css (courtesy of some other kind monk who's name I've long since forgotten), in my Display settings/On-site CSS markup thingy:

textarea {
    width: 100%;
    height: 25em;
}
[download]

That has the effect of doubling the width over the standard view, at which point it butts up against the sidebar. A very useful increase, but still less than it could be.

I still find it limiting when, as my old eyes get tired, I zoom the page to 150% or 200% to compensate. Trouble is of course, the sidebar also gets bigger. So as the font increases in size, the effective usable area barely changes or even starts to shrink.

Were I able to turn off the sidebar, not only would that increase the screen real-state available for use in the textarea. It would also avoid the annoyance of seeing a new /msg appear, instinctively click it, and watch what I've typed so far disappear in to the lottery that is the browser cache.

Most times you can back up to it, but sometimes--always when you've typed the most because you've been using lots of other tabs to do research--when you back up the page has been flushed from cache and Whoops! Sorry. All gone. Which is intensely annoying.

I also think that clicking or responding to /msgs is responsible for a lot of duplicates posts, so it might help there also.

But best of all, anything that reduces the impact on the PM servers has to be good right?