I don’t think this is in most cases a good thing to do. Overall writingc8 c' b a e[ e'] cis'[ d'] is not really more effort than c8 c' b a e e' \| cis' d' But on the other hand the first notation gives precicesly what you want, while the latter is somewhat fuzzy and relies on particular behaviour of the autobeaming. I think using autobeaming is accepting what Lilypond thinks is okay beaming. When you use manual beaming you are deciding that you want to specify the beaming yourself. But then you should not partially rely on autobeaming again there. Because if then autobeaming behaviour changes (since the assumption is that whatever Lilypond creates works for you, so this might improve in some ways in future and that should be fine) your manual changes might not produce what you want anymore.
I only partly agree, since you can control the autobeaming
mechanism yourself and thereby have control of what the general
rules are that you make exceptions to. I often end up tweaking the
autobeaming patterns when typesetting music, for example from the
18th century, where I can tweak the autobeaming to imitate most of
what's found in the original manuscript. Still, there are often a
few places where the original beaming does not conform to the
general pattern, or where the autobeaming mechanism in LilyPond is
not flexible enough to describe a more complicated pattern. In
those situations I would appreciate the proposed shorthand syntax,
even though it perhaps doesn't save a lot of key strokes.
/Mats
