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I have 2 actions, walk and idle. The idle animation is much longer than the walk. Each time I want to check my animations, I have to adjust the timeline ending frame, right now that's not too bad, as I only have 2 animations, but could be a pain when I want to go through more animations.
So the question is; Is there a way to set a start / end frame for each action?
No you can't set a start/end frame for each action as the start and end frame is a setting that is global for the current scene.
Pressing Ctrl + End while your cursor is over the timeline will set the end frame to the current frame. A quick click at the last keyframe and a keystroke is easier than manually entering the end frame number. You can also press Ctrl + Home to set the start frame. This only works when the cursor is atop the timeline panel.
There is also a preview frame range setting, this allows you to adjust the start and end frames while animating without changing the frames that are used when rendering. This is useful when you only want to play a section of the animation that you are concentrating on.
The preview range leads to a shortcut that makes changing the frame range even easier while animating, press P and drag from the start to end frame to set the preview range. This works in any of the time based editors - timeline, dopesheet, graph editor, NLA editor, video sequencer.
There is always a bunch of different ways to do stuff in Blender. One of which is to use NLA editor to make shorter animation repeat for all time needed like this:
