I use eeschema to document the reverse engineering of vintage equipment, and have built a number of libraries for that purpose. My problem is that when placing symbols the reference designator and the “value” of the component are visible by default, and since the value is, by default, the name of the component, it can be quite lengthy.
Needless to say things can get pretty cluttered if I don’t edit the symbol to hide the value when placing it. Is there a way to turn off this behavior and have the value hidden by default? Or is there a way to bulk edit the symbols to hide all the values at once? I prefer to just unhide and edit the values as/when needed. Thanks.
You can use Schematic Editor / Edit / Edit Text and Graphics Properties to bulk edit many things, including visibility of fields.
Another option is to make a copy of the default resistor into a personal library and change it to reflect your personal wishes. But the simplest method is to take a default resistor, hide it’s value, (maybe add a footprint) and then make duplicates of that resistor for all the other resistors.
Really. Hovering over a resistor, capacitor, power symbol or any of the other often occuring symbols in a schematic and pressing [Ctrl + d] to make a duplicate is usually a tiny bit quicker then pressing a to add a symbol and typing r for a resistor and then pressing [Enter], because you have to wait a second or so between the a and the r because KiCad ignores keystrokes while the libraries are loading.