Anyway, the bottom pane unfortunately does not have a simple way for me to move it downwards, so 60% is now occupied with this status/compiler/messages/scribble/tasks widget and I can not resize it.
As @elextr mentioned, you should be able to resize it, but lately we heard of people having desktop themes making it both hard to see (close to no visual indicator) an operate (about a 1px line triggering the feature). Unfortunately there's nothing we can do about that, apart telling out users to use a more sensible theme and tell the authors of the offending theme to go fix it.
Also, this area doesn't take up "60%". It takes up a configurable amount (via the handle your theme is hiding from you), and the default size is an unfortunate conflict between how this resizes with the window size and the default Geany window size. But again, this should be easily configured by a mouse drag, and stays there where you put it across Geany runs.
- Second, and perhaps more importantly ... I did not have any bottom bane widget at all (actually I was even trying to find vte yesterday, but I guess I don't have vte installed or geany can not find it, so I was confused when a bottom pane suddenly showed up altogether).
As @elextr mentioned there's an option to hide it. Having it hidden also explains why it popped up after a *Search all in document*. Maybe you hid this area because you couldn't find how to resize it?
[…] right now when I want to continue to search, I have to select the "Find" button; the "Cancel" button is the default focus, so when I hit enter, rather than searching again, that sub-widget is closed. That confuses me too; was different in my old editor. I can see people want to prefer cancel, but it may be better
to be able to allow users to tweak it.
There already is an option to always wrap search, see *Edit → Preferences →General → Miscellaneous → Search → Always wrap search*. Also, you can use <kbd><Alt>+f</kbd> in to find. This said, it's also possible to cancel this dialog with <kbd>Esc</kbd> so it might not be a problem to change it, but it might also have been made this way to prevent accidental wraparound.
Or to actually make an "In Document" search also part of the top-options, rather the expanded ones,
The expanded state of the *Find all* section is remembered across runs, so it shouldn't be a problem: if you like it better having it, just leave it open.