Subtitle Edit

the subtitle editor :)

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Edit Menu

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

Undo / Redo

Undo or redo the last editing action.

• Undo: Ctrl+Z
• Redo: Ctrl+Y

Show History

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

Find

Search for text in the subtitle.

• Menu: Edit → Find
• Shortcut: Ctrl+F
• Find next: F3
• Find previous: Shift+F3

Options:

• Whole word (checkbox)
• Search type (radio buttons): Case sensitive, Case insensitive, or Regular expression

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.

Replace

Find and replace text in the subtitle.

• Menu: Edit → Replace
• Shortcut: Ctrl+H

Multiple Replace

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

• Menu: Edit → 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.

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).

Managing categories

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

• Edit — rename the category
• New category — add a sibling category
• New rule — add a rule to this category
• Move up / Move down — reorder categories
• Delete — remove the category and all its rules
• Import — load rules from a .template file (JSON or legacy SE4 XML), a .csv file, or a Subtitle Edit 4 Settings.xml (its multiple replace groups are imported directly)
• Export — save selected categories to a .template (JSON) or .csv file

Managing rules

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

• Edit rule — change find/replace text, type, and description
• Duplicate — insert a copy of the rule above the current one
• Insert before / Insert after — add a new rule relative to this one
• Move up / Move down — reorder within the category
• Delete — remove the rule

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+-).

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.).

• Menu: Edit → Modify selection…

Select All

Select all subtitle lines.

• Shortcut: Ctrl+A

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.