The use of the edit duration key commands is by far one of my favourite things about Dorico, and in combination with Insert mode is extremely useful. Just being able to tweak the rhythm of a passage by making one note shorter or longer is great and really agrees with my mode of work, and is super fast.
with one major caveat:
This is only really the case as long as one works linearly from start of the work to to the end. Often however I jump around, working on the middle, the end, then back to the beginning, and often I find that using edit duration in combination with Insert has caused some unwanted side-effects later on, in that it’s pushed a passage out of time, earlier or later. Obviously that’s my fault for forgetting that I have material on the same staff later on that will be affected.
However in an ideal world I’d love to be able to use these functions on a bar or two without it affecting something 50 or more bars later in the piece. I’m not sure how exactly that would work, as I can see there are also situations whwere one perhaps does want to move a whole long section, but if there was some way of having Insert affecting either a very localised section, or more globally would be good.
Maybe an option in the properties to lock a passage down rhythmically, so that even the use of the insert mode elsewhere doesn’t affect it?
Be interested to know if others run into this, or have thoughts on it.