When creating a schematic I could not find a suitable symbol, so I made a new one by copying a similar symbol. The original had a couple of extra pins which I thought I had deleted. When I ran ERC it reported duplicate pin numbers, which was confusing because the visible pins were labelled correctly.
The issue turned out to be two leftover pins from the reference symbol that were still present but hidden. They were sitting at the same coordinates as one of the real pins, which made the duplication hard to spot.
An AI suggested that hidden pins were likely to be the cause, but KiCad did not make them easy to reveal. I eventually opened my custom symbols library file in a text editor, located the hidden pins, changed “hide=yes” to “hide=no”, saved, reopened the schematic, moved the real pin aside, and deleted the unwanted ones.
Is there a better way in KiCad to expose hidden items like this without editing the library file directly?
Also, how could those two pins have ended up hidden in the first place? I assume I did not remove them correctly, but I am not sure exactly what I did.
Many thanks.