Really appreciate the help I’ve been getting here by the way. My current question has to do with just where the line is between symbol and footprint. I’m using a small DC-DC converter module in this design. I found a handy schematic symbol that looks like it but all I really need for a “footprint” on the PCB is a 7 pin header. There’s no problem substituting the footprint itself, the issue is the pin numbers don’t happen to be even close between the two part #s, now with my old tool I could just unlock the pins right on the schematic and change them.
That doesn’t seem to be possible here, I suppose I can “generate a new footprint” but this is only a one-off and happens to be a bad time for me to learn a whole new editor (footprint) and now I’ve got a custom library and have to make sure THIS PCB is always built with THIS library, guess there’s methods for that too but again it isn’t something I wanted to “stop the world and figure out” right now! Any help as to what the most expeditious approach to do this would be much appreciated.
Symbols can not be different than they are in the library because kicad does not store symbol information inside the schematic.
Also what you try to do is quite hacky. The best solution really is to copy the original symbol into a project local lib and change it there. (KiCad stores which library a symbol is from inside the schematic. It also caches the symbol in the cache lib so you should be save from future differences in the lib.)
The TlDr version for deriving a symbol from an existing one. The first step would be to make a new symbol library (if you do not yet have a personal library). In the symbol editor file -> new library. I would in this case suggest to store the lib inside the project folder. Also add it to the project library table (more details: Creating a new symbol library and a new symbol in KiCad 5)
Then open the symbol you want to change and use save as to store it into this new library. Then change it however you like. (more details Tutorial: How to make a symbol (KiCad v5.1.x) section Example with separate power uints)