Hi!
Subtitle support in kdenlive is still very much a work in progress, so expect a few nits right now (and if you search this forum you’ll get a sense of what’s already known and being worked on) - but that said, if you’re actively using it, and especially if you have prior experience and good workflows picked up from other tools, your feedback is especially welcome.
There are lots of ways to work with this, and I can only advocate for my habits if we don’t have other voices speaking up for theirs.
The short answer is “you can’t” - it’s a modal dialog that lets you look at most things and modify a few, but it runs separate to the normal editing workflow and was not designed to be a normal part of it. When you need something only it has an interface for, you open it, do that thing, then close it and go back to editing in the timeline.
But the good news (I hope!) is that I have some changes to this already in progress that should make it more like what you’re imagining here.
I wasn’t planning to make that a widget that was part of the normal editing layout either - but it is a non-modal dialog window with a live view of the project, so if you make changes in it they are immediately reflected in the timeline and monitor and vice versa, even before you commit to making those ‘permanent’ changes to the project (ie. push them on to its main undo stack).
So I am curious to hear more about exactly what you want to be able to see and do in this that you can’t in the normal timeline?
You can already see an overview of “all the subtitiles” just by zooming in and out of the timeline - so I’m assuming there’s something specific you want that’s a bit more than that. And the more I know about what you want, the more likely it is you’ll be able to do that by the time I’m finished with these changes.
My own initial list of nits is here: 24.12.0 subtitle editing
And that’s probably a good place to detail any you’d like to add to that, because that’s the checklist I’m working to for the initial set of Next Revisions toward having a fully fledged subtitle editor integrated with other timeline editing.
For now, if it’s any help for some tasks, you should be able to round trip ass files between kdenlive and Other Tools. You can’t do that while kdenlive is running, but if you reopen your project with externally modified ass file, they should work just fine if they don’t do anything that’s not well or widely supported.