Early UI design

This is an application for in house use
Features over flash

Used to have a structure UI pages for building up the search. Users told us they would rather have a WestLaw natural language syntax. A SQL like language. 

select * from documents where fName = 'bill' and date > 1/1/2002

The crazy colors are sliders and those colors will change.

We had some stuff in pop up Windows but some users would hide them and get stuck. Hoping to just have one window where the get real estate via sliders and tabs.

The number of features is down as users in it full time wanted anything what would save a key stroke. But user that were not in the app a lot felt over whelmed.

This is designed after a tool from Microsoft called SQL Server Management Studio for database queries.

Can this design be improved? If so how?

client

Just spacing stuff out as suggested in the accepted answer helps

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P.S. there is a log in page first that introduces the product.

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