Well, Phil Farrand designed Finale for the express purpose of playing music on a keyboard and having it notated.
I can recommend the Akai LPK25, which is a decent and fairly robust small USB keyboard.
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For me the keyboard, combined with duration number keys, R as explained above and the octave shift shortcuts CMD/CTRL+Alt/Option up or down and finally an accidental shortcut if needed is also the fastest.
With my MIDI keyboard input goes fast but I often forget to change the duration and have to scroll back to correct a lot of notes.
Recording is an other option but one has to play very precise.
Just in case there’s any confusion about how Pitch-first Arrow key input works in Finale, here’s an gif as an example:
It’s really fast when you don’t have access to a MIDI keyboard.
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Ahhh… memories…
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I only used Simply Entry in Finale, because I could never make Speedy do anything except rests.
Took me a few years to figure out the problem, by which time I was proficient enough in Simple!
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Everyone here talks about speedy entry thinking non-Finale users know what that even is.
That aside, when I used Sibelius I was probably quite slow on note input because I used mouse most of the time. Almost fell into that trap on Dorico, but I made efforts to adapt to duration and then pitch, felt very efficient for me. Pitch before duration looks ok, but seems to be slower overall, except for chords.
They look more than fair.
I only used Speedy! In fact, since we could customize the icons, I always removed Simple since it was only there to annoy me when I accidentally clicked on it, LOL! (With the rests I’m guessing you had Speedy / Use MIDI Device for Input selected, but no MIDI device?)
That’s why I posted the gif. Even Finale users who never used that method might not know what it is.
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I thought “Speedy Entry” was distinct from “pitch first then duration” method 
Seems good for neighbour notes, but for jumps not good at all. How do you add accidentals?
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In my first summer with Dorico I hadn’t hooked up a midi keyboard yet, and I recopied an entire Mahler symphony movement with alphabetic entry!
Just after you input the note:
Arrow-key Speedy was certainly never my primary method of input. I almost always used Speedy with a MIDI keyboard. This was my “I’m on a deadline but have a 45 minute subway ride and too much other stuff to carry” method. It’s pretty fast when you don’t have access to a MIDI keyboard.
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Hi, I’m glad, that I’m not alone with that.
Just opened a very similar thread while sharing the absolute same desire:
Indeed, I do not think in note-names, and even the Dorico-Option “pitch-before-duration” does not prevent the nessecity of using letters.
And yes, I could connect a MIDI-Keyboard. However, while writing parts for choir, I do not need it. My fingers are far quicker then my brain. Finales Speedy-Entry-Method is exactly as quick or slow as I’m able to think.
I can just sign Mr. Wagners message in all details.
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Finale used the Caps Lock key to accomplish duration-before-pitch. I used it once in a while like you said, for several 16ths in a row or something
Another 25-year Finale user here, absolute noob on Dorico. I got quite fast and efficient entering music with Speedy Entry, with one hand on the arrow keys and the other on the numeric keypad. I’ve never owned a MIDI keyboard, so I didn’t have that option. Even big jumps weren’t a problem: a fifth is four taps of the arrow key, an octave is seven taps of the arrow key, and I seldom have to go much farther than that.
I can sorta do that with pitch-before-duration, but I need to hold down the option key while tapping arrows. Or I need to re-map the keys (which I haven’t learned how to do yet, and I haven’t correctly guessed the name of that operation: it’s nothing starting with “change key” or “map” or “remap” or “redefine”. This “J” command lookup is nifty, but comes up with no hits alarmingly often, whenever I don’t know the precise name Dorico uses for a command.)
In principle, I would be OK with duration-before-pitch, as long as I can enter notes completely with the computer keyboard, not moving a hand to the mouse and preferably not needing keychords very often.
For what it’s worth:
I’m a Stream Deck XL owner and just tried it and can thus confirm:
The function to edit existing notes with a single key press on the SD also works during PBD note entry!
All you have to do is enter the very first note manually, since the “ghost” representation is not showing initially. After that, the caret automatically advances to the next grid position after the last input note.
And since SD is very freely configurable indeed, this would be your ticket to have actual, tactile buttons recreate Finale’s Speedy Entry with 99.9% accuracy right now.
Cheers,
Benji
That is essentially my method. I very rarely use MIDI keyboard.
I would recommend using the note names (a-g) to enter notes directly rather than nudging things around with alt/opt-arrows. And to transpose a note you may find (eg) shift-i t6 quicker.
I think it is essential to create key commands to set the grid.
There is mouse-work involved, but mostly for navigating and making selections.
There are default keys to set the duration grid: Alt [ and ] .
I must have been the only Finale in the world to use Simple Entry. However, it was often said on the Finale forum that “Simple isn’t necessarily Simple, and Speedy isn’t necessarily Speedy”.
Yes, but they nudge rather being absolute, and you have to nudge past each dotted duration…
I’m getting the sense that Dorico really wants you to use note names rather than intervals for entering notes from the computer keyboard. So, on the “when in Rome” principle, I tried that, and it was in fact faster than using option-arrow-keys to get from one note’s pitch to the next note’s pitch.
Except when there’s a leap of more than a 4th: the note-name technique always picks the closest note of the specified value, so if you’re leaping by a 5th or more, it’ll pick one in the wrong octave and you have to correct it with pretzel-option-arrow-key (which transposes a note by an octave; I ran into that by chance while trying to do something else).
And then there’s this update from Daniel, posted earlier… certainly going to be another option for folk to choose, coming soon…!
Deeply desired: Finale’s “Speedy Entry” inside of Dorico - Dorico - Steinberg Forums
Shift-Alt + note-name forces the note to go up. And ctrl-alt + note-name forces the note to go down.