I've been using chat mode with Nano Banana for a few hours now. While it's not capturing the details of my reference image's artistic style as well as I would like, it's been working just fine and creating images that are mostly consistent, so I'll be able to use them for a clipart or sticker set -- so that's good.

The one thing that is bothering me is that when I turn Chat mode on a big sidebar opens on the left. Most of it is wasted space taking up that whole side of the screen. In order to bring in a new image for example, because all the tools normally on the left are covered over by this Chat Mode sidebar I have to turn Chat Mode off and on again to bring in new images to use as reference. I think there are ways that you can eliminate this big sidebar while retaining the functionality. For example, the actual prompt box is quite small and compact. If that was standalone and detached so we could move it around onscreen to where it is convenient for us, that would really help. Maybe there could be a way to contract/expand it so that if we have it pinned to the top right of the screen, to expand it to show the quick action options, a new pane could slide down from the prompt box, then we could 'roll it back up' when we are finished with it. I think that would be a quite elegant solution to enhance usability and preserve as much real estate as possible on screen for the images we are producing, and the left sidebar elements like the normal prompt box, and the image, upload image, frame, etc elements.