Reducing scrolling in comment panel: no minimum height, tweak layout, or auto-scroll?

[jessexknight]

I have some collaborators who write a lot of comments. I recently upgraded to 25.2 and love the ability to widen the comment column to shrink the height of long comments and reduce my scrolling. However, a lot of vertical space is still “wasted” by the comment author name, date, and what seems to be a minimum comment box height of about 75px.

I would love the ability to tweak this minimum comment box height and/or to rearrange the author/date info to be a) combined on one line or b) completely beside the comment text itself (though authors with long names may pose a challenge).

A related suggestion would be the option to auto-scroll the comments when the cursor is placed somewhere new, since we currently have to use the arrows manually navigate and reveal nearby comments.

[EarnestAl]

@jessexknight

A related suggestion would be the option to auto-scroll the comments when the cursor is placed somewhere new, since we currently have to use the arrows manually navigate and reveal nearby comments

Do you use Navigator to show the comments?

Also there is an experimental feature for a Comment pane in the Sidebar, see Comments Deck

The warning is well justified as I lost my Sidebar entirely and had to reset my user profile (on a parallel installation I use for questions here so no big problem for me) to get it back. I implemented the experimental feature a second time and opened the comments pane before entering any comments in a new document.
Unfortunately, it still needs work to get it useful. For instance clicking Collapse should collapse it to just the name and date but instead it collapses it to collapse.

@jessexknight

I would love the ability to tweak this minimum comment box height and/or to rearrange the author/date info to be a) combined on one line or b) completely beside the comment text itself (though authors with long names may pose a challenge).

Probably best to report an enhancement bug, How to Report Bugs in LibreOffice - The Document Foundation Wiki

[jessexknight]

Thanks very much or your suggestions! The navigator is indeed helpful. I did not know about Comment pane, but as you say it is not quite ready yet.

Per your suggestion, I have added a comment / suggestion to an existing bug on bugzilla (62150) which seems to reflect the same fundamental issue about comment density.