This is an old thread, but thought I would throw this out there. I updated a bunch of footprints and needed to hide all the “value” fields as mentioned above. I opened the pcb file in Vim and ran a one-liner:
%s/^.* value .*)$/& hide
This could be done with Sed also, and changing “value” to “value 10uF” lets you be more selective. The power of KiCAD’s human readable file formats.