There is no way to copy-paste a box of pixels into the same layer.

[Roxfall]

This is a feature that exists in Photoshop that is a pain point for me as a new user. It appears to be missing in Affinity Photo and it makes baby Hitler murder baby Jesus with a vacuum and a toy dinosaur.

When I have a layer with effects on it, and I have a pixel-art box that I want to make a few pixels wider or taller or narrower, my usual workflow is to press M for rectangular box, select the edge of the box I want to move, then press V for Move tool. Then I do this weird Kung-fu triple finger dinosaur strike to hit Alt-Ctrl-Shift so I can sliiiide this part of the box over along a single axis and create a copy of it, overwriting the pixels in that layer with its new contents. And boom! Now my box is slightly wider or narrower. It's also handy when I need to copy-move a visual element in one axis with precise controls.

Not so in Affinity Photo, this feature is not there.

Yeah, I can copy pasta the box into a new layer, then disable all other layers (click, click, click... click n-infinity-1 click) to merge the two layers together, oh but wait now I need to apply my layer effects all over again. Then hey, paste FX doesn't do it right, the pillow emboss didn't set the border correctly, why is the number doubled? I need to adjust it again. Then I have to delete the other layers and re-enable the layers again (click, click, click...).

Can I work around it? Yeah, but I'm lazy so I'd rather work with a program that lets me do it the lazy way.

I realize this post sounds rather negative, so let me put a positive spin on it. How much money do I need to throw at my screen to make this happen?

[Fixx]

CMD-E is Merge Down, that works one layer at the time. Don't know about fx behaviour.

[Roxfall]

Aha! That is helpful. Thanks a bunch.

I still wish I could copy pasta into the same layer without extra steps.