Subtitle Edit

the subtitle editor :)

Edit Menu

The Edit menu provides tools for finding, replacing, and modifying subtitle text and selections.

Edit Menu

Undo / Redo

Undo or redo the last editing action.

Show History

View the complete history of changes made to the subtitle file and restore any previous state.

Show History

Find

Search for text in the subtitle.

Options:

Matching a line break with a regular expression: use \n between the words on the two lines (for example ear\ntwice). \r\n and \r are accepted too and are treated the same as \n, so a rule works regardless of how it was written or which platform created it.

^ and $ in Find and Replace match the start and the end of the whole subtitle text, so in a two-line subtitle ^- only finds the dash on the first line. Write (?m) in front of the pattern - (?m)^- - to make them match at every line break instead. (Multiple replace is the other way around, see below.)

Slow patterns: a pattern that has not finished with a single subtitle after five seconds is given up on and treated as no match for that subtitle, so an expression that backtracks forever - (a+)+b and friends - cannot lock up the program.

Translator mode: with an original subtitle loaded, both the text and the original text are searched. Within a line the text is searched first, then the original text, and the match is selected in the text box of the column it was found in.

Find

Replace

Find and replace text in the subtitle.

With an editable original subtitle loaded, a Replace/search in drop-down appears with three choices:

The choice is remembered between sessions. It also applies to F3 / Shift+F3 until the Find window is used again, which always searches both columns. The drop-down is hidden when there is no original subtitle, or when the original is opened as a read-only reference - a read-only original is never written to.

Replacement text: group references work - $1, $&, ${name} - and \n inserts a line break. Other backslash escapes are not expanded there: \t and \u00A0 are inserted as those literal characters. To insert a special character, paste the character itself into the Replace with box. In the search pattern all .NET escapes work as usual, \u00A0 included.

Replace

Multiple Replace

Apply multiple find-and-replace rules at once, organized into named categories. Rules are persisted across sessions.

Multiple Replace

Window layout

The window is split into two resizable panels:

Panel Description
Left — Rules Tree of categories and their rules. Each rule shows its type icon, find pattern, replacement, and an optional description.
Right — Fixes Preview of all lines that will be changed. The Before column highlights removed characters in red and the After column highlights added characters in green. Selecting a row reveals an Applied rules detail panel at the bottom listing every rule that matched that line.

Choosing which fixes to apply

Every line in the preview starts ticked in the Apply column, and only ticked lines are changed by OK or Apply. Untick a line to leave it as it is.

Right-click the preview to tick or untick many rows at once:

Space toggles the checkbox of the rows that are highlighted, so a range selected with Shift+click can be flipped in one go. These gestures work while the preview has focus; the rules tree keeps its own shortcuts below.

Editing a rule regenerates the preview, which ticks every row again.

Rule types

Each rule has one of three match types, shown as an icon in the tree:

Type Description
Case insensitive Plain text match, ignores case
Case sensitive Plain text match, exact case
Regular expression Full .NET regex syntax. Use \n to match a line break between two lines (\r\n and \r are accepted too and treated as \n).

Unlike Find and Replace, regular expression rules here are matched in multiline mode: ^ and $ match at the start and the end of every line, so ^- strips the dash from both lines of a two-line subtitle. Put (?-m) in front of the pattern to anchor to the whole subtitle text instead. The replacement text follows the same rules as in Replace above - $1 and \n work, other backslash escapes do not.

Managing categories

Right-click a category node to open its context menu:

Managing rules

Right-click a rule node to open its context menu:

Double-clicking a rule also opens the Edit rule dialog.

Keyboard shortcuts

Shortcut Action
Ctrl+N Add a new rule to the selected category, or insert after the selected rule
Ctrl+D Duplicate the selected rule
Ctrl+F Find a rule by name / text
Ctrl+Shift+- Collapse all categories
Ctrl+Shift++ Expand all categories
Delete Delete the selected rule (focus must be in the rules tree)
Space Toggle the selected node (category or rule) on/off
Escape Close the window
F1 Open help

The expand/collapse buttons (+ / −) above the tree expand or collapse all categories at once (Ctrl+Shift++ / Ctrl+Shift+-).

Note: Ctrl+D duplicates the selected rule, except while the fixes preview has focus — there it unticks every row, as in the other preview lists (see Choosing which fixes to apply).

Import / Export

Rule sets are stored as JSON .template files and can be shared across installations. The export dialog lets you choose which categories to include. SE4-format XML files can also be imported — both rule files exported from Subtitle Edit 4 and a full Subtitle Edit 4 Settings.xml (found in %AppData%\Subtitle Edit, or next to SubtitleEdit.exe for portable installs), whose multiple replace groups are then imported.

Rules can also be exported to and imported from CSV (choose the .csv type in the export/import dialog), which is convenient for editing rules in a spreadsheet or sharing them as a simple table.

The CSV has one row per rule with this header:

Category,Find,ReplaceWith,Description,Active,Type
Column Description
Category Category the rule belongs to (rules with the same name are grouped; empty becomes Default)
Find Text or pattern to search for
ReplaceWith Replacement text (may be empty)
Description Optional note
Active true or false — whether the rule is enabled
Type CaseInsensitive, CaseSensitive, or RegularExpression

Values are quoted per RFC 4180, so Find/ReplaceWith may contain commas, double quotes (written as "") and line breaks. The header row is optional on import; unknown Type values fall back to CaseInsensitive. Files are written as UTF-8 (with BOM) so non-ASCII rules open correctly in spreadsheet apps.

Example:

Category,Find,ReplaceWith,Description,Active,Type
General,"hello, world","say ""hi""",greeting,true,CaseInsensitive
Regex,\d+,#,strip numbers,true,RegularExpression

Modify Selection

Select or deselect subtitle lines based on rules (e.g., text contains, duration, etc.).

See Modify Selection for the full list of rules and selection actions.

Select All

Select all subtitle lines.

Inverse Selection

Invert the current selection (select unselected lines, deselect selected ones).

Toggle Right-to-Left

Toggle right-to-left text direction for languages like Arabic and Hebrew.