Here is a skin with a slightly different approach, it gives the user a very long input but tries to keep plenty of other space available on the desktop for other goodies.
NOTE: This skin should display in full screen, like shown beneath, I have tried it in a number of resolutions and can get it to work right using window size set to max in Hals menu. However for some reason sometimes it refused to go full screen then I had to play around to get it to work right, I found if you close Hal so he’s not showing on the taskbar but is in the sys tray still, then right click the menu down there and set window to max it normally works.

You can download it from the link at the bottom of this post.