Bug 506414

screen recording
https://youtu.be/9VGUd8KXSYw

Assigning to Ron since he is working on subtitles

(In reply to louis from comment #0)
> When dragging subtitles around I keep accidentally causing kdenlive to create an extra subtitles track
> that I then have to delete. Driving me nuts.   (Dragging video tracks thankfully doesn't do this)

Yeah, that's adding an extra layer, which in the current implementation is a workaround for it not otherwise being able to have two subtitles with the same start time.  Accidentally doing that so easily really annoyed me too :)

I'd initially added a safety catch to it (so that you needed to hold down shift to create a new layer), but the way the new implementation that I've been working on is looking, it shouldn't actually be needed anymore at all (since it allows subtitles to overlap just fine), so it will likely just go away entirely.

My list of initial grumbles, which got me working on this in the first place, is here: https://discuss.kde.org/t/24-12-0-subtitle-editing/27471
so if there is anything else on your wishlist for improvements with this, please feel free to add or discuss them there.

As a workaround for 25.08, I would propose that we completely disable this "feature". Subtitle layers (tracks) can be created from the subtitles config menu, and it's not such a frequent / daily that it is necessary to create new ones by dragging. I never used subtitles layers but I agree this behavior is annoying. So does that seem ok to you to just disable the add layer on drag ?

A possibly relevant merge request was started @ https://invent.kde.org/multimedia/kdenlive/-/merge_requests/672

(In reply to Jean-Baptiste Mardelle from comment #4)

If you're keen to have a fix in for 25.08, maybe the MR I just pushed will be a bit safer than
trying to remove this completely?

It's cherry picked from my WIP branch and implements the safety catch I noted earlier.

With this, dragging a subtitle clip down won't create a new layer unless you hold <Shift> while dragging.
Which should stop it happening by accident, but still leaves it possible to do if someone really has come
to like and use it (with the benefit that it might shake them out to report "it's broken" before they learn
the real change, and we can find out why they are using layers in the first place).

I do think making 'layers' such a normal part of adding subtitles was a misfeature for quite a few reasons,
(they behave somewhat the opposite to how they are displayed in the timeline might suggest), but the
current implementation made it the only way to have separate subtitles with the same start time, so it's
a bit of a necessary evil for some until we get the larger structural changes in to remove that limitation.

Git commit d5e443ad13185728d5078baba29bf5b9318ad89e by Jean-Baptiste Mardelle, on behalf of Ron El.
Committed on 13/07/2025 at 11:03.
Pushed by mardelle into branch 'master'.

Defang dragging subtitle clips down to create a new layer

It was too easy to accidentally do that, so make it require <shift>-drag
as a safety catch.
FIXED-IN: 25.08.0

M  +2    -2    src/timeline2/view/qml/SubTitle.qml

https://invent.kde.org/multimedia/kdenlive/-/commit/d5e443ad13185728d5078baba29bf5b9318ad89e

Git commit b81bb0681422ae6d4dcf75bb2cb9468f6452ce42 by Jean-Baptiste Mardelle, on behalf of Ron El.
Committed on 13/07/2025 at 11:05.
Pushed by mardelle into branch 'release/25.08'.

Defang dragging subtitle clips down to create a new layer

It was too easy to accidentally do that, so make it require <shift>-drag
as a safety catch.
FIXED-IN: 25.08.0

M  +2    -2    src/timeline2/view/qml/SubTitle.qml

https://invent.kde.org/multimedia/kdenlive/-/commit/b81bb0681422ae6d4dcf75bb2cb9468f6452ce42