in the Symbol Fields editor window. The first two items are probably hard-coded somehow and so I need to know where they are defined. I can change both order and widths of the columns of during an editing session but those settings are not persistent to the next opening of the editor.
The last item above puzzles me. There is a button to add fields but not one to remove them. When a field is added, it is persistent which is desirable. However, there does not seem to be a way to recover from mistakenly adding a field. All one can do is hide it which isn’t enough. Again, where do I find where the list of symbol fields is stored for this editor so that I can remove one or more?
Custom fields that are not set on any symbol are automatically removed. I.e. if you didn’t input any value and the whole column is empty then next time you open field editor it will be gone. If you want to remove the column just remove all values.
I tried your suggestion. It didn’t work. I am using KiCAD 5.1.5-0-10_14 with wxWidgets 3.0.4 Unicode and Boost 1.69.0 on a Mac. Perhaps that has something to do with it.
I tried clearing all entries in the column and then clicking “Apply, ave schematic and continue” followed by “Ok”. The Symbol Fields editor closed. Then I saved the schematic and closed KiCAD. Then I opened KiCAD again, displayed the same schematic as before, clicked on the Symbol Fields editor icon and the spreadsheet appeared with the erroneous column in it as before and nothing in the column.
Hm, I just tried it and this no longer works, I would consider this a bug.
Essentially eeschema just stores empty string as value instead of removing the field entry.
What you can do for now is open the schematic file with a text editor and search for the name of the field.
You will see entries like this F 4 "" H 3350 3550 50 0001 C CNN "myfield"
where myfield is the field name.
Just remove these lines and the field will disappear.
Remember to make a backup of the files before you edit them.