I’m trying to connect a power rail to the VCC of the U7, but when I click the “show hidden pins” icon on the left toolbar, nothing really happens. The icon stays unselected. I’m using one of the recent nightly builds (Jan 11 '18)
the symbol does have the power pins defined as hidden
am I doing something wrong or was it a bad idea to use the nightly build ?
To be honest, this is not the best idea. You will never be able to use such symbols if you have multiple power supplies or even if you try to turn off part off your circuit. (Invisible power pins are global labels. This is how the power symbols work in kicad.)
Nightly builds like all software have bugs. Because they have new not yet widely tested features you must expect a higher number of bugs. This includes critical bugs. (Nightly builds are meant to be there to expose new features to a wider audience. The hope is that this will increase the quality of the stable release.)
Users of nightly builds should be aware of this danger.
Another additional danger is that nightly builds might produce files that can not be used by any version different to the one used to produce them. (Mainly older versions might not be able to use these files.) This fact might lock you into using nightly builds until your project is finished.
For now your best course of action would be to either use symbols without invisible power pins. (They after all have their own dangers) Or try to update to a newer nightly build version in the hope that this bug has been fixed already. If not please report the bug over at the bugtracker. Give as much detail as possible. (version numbers that you know are affected, description of how to reproduce it, operating system details, …)
Iff you used a nightly version before the merger of the sym-lib-table and did not yet design the pcb side you can switch to the stable release. Even if you already started with the pcb you can try to switch to the stable release. This should work as long as you did not use differential pairs, rounded rectangle pads or polygon pads. (There might be other problems so maybe try it in a virtual machine first.)
thanks Rene. I will probably replace a few symbols to ones without the hidden power pins. I don’t even have the VCC net and some of these components are powered from different rails…
I got the nightly because i liked some of the new features in the pcbnew interactive track routing. Hope it all works in the end, keeping fingers crossed 
That seems to be bug. As a workaround, I can change the option in General Options and turn it on/off, but the tool button still doesn’t work.
BTW, you shouldn’t connect hidden power pins, they connect automatically, which is not actually a good thing.
@Rene_Poschl the Logic_74xgxx lib has hidden pins. I just did a quick grep, hidden power pins exist in
Connector_Specialized.lib:X
FPGA_Xilinx.lib:X
Logic_74xgxx.lib:X
Logic_CMOS_IEEE.lib:X
Logic_TTL_IEEE.lib:X
MCU_Microchip_SAML.lib:X
Memory_EEPROM.lib:X
Memory_Flash.lib:X
Memory_NVRAM.lib:X
Memory_RAM.lib:X
Memory_ROM.lib:X
pspice.lib:X
Sensor_Temperature.lib:X
Transistor_Array.lib:X
Video.lib:X
Well we (the kicad community) have a lot of work before us to fix this problem once and for all.
Every contribution is welcome. (Especially if it does fix an existing problem)
I’m actually working on several of those libs literally right now!
Fixing the graphical stuff is quite easy with my script, the slow and tedious bit is filling in footprint and documentation info, as I have to fill that in by hand.
You say that, but many people make contributions but they are often held up and eventually abandoned because they don’t fully meet the KLC (which is always changing, and never up to date). This actually gives people the impression that contributions are not really that welcome and puts them off. I see a lot of one-time contributors who attempt to make a PR, give up and are not seen again.
We either need to adopt a more flexible approach, or make it clear that there is a certain standard to meet. But inviting people in and then rebuffing their submissions is not good.
I think if you say “Contributions are welcome if you are willing to comply with the KLC and other ad hoc requirements” it would be more accurate.
I will remember to be more clear about this.
You are right we only accept contributions that (within reason) meat the KLC.
I hope that the current KLC will stay a bit more stable then what we had in the last year. We now have (in my opinion) a good set of rules. Yes some of the rules might need a bit clarification. I hope we do not need to change the rules such that they are incompatible with the current set of rules. (At least this will be my goal as the new head of the library team.)
Edit: We might adapt a policy where we allow partial fixes. For example if a contributor fixes one problem with a symbol that already had some KLC violations we could accept it as long as no new violations had been introduced. (We will of course always ask if the user is prepared to fix the remaining problems.)
In fact the transferring of the libs into the new repo was an example of when we allowed partial fixes.
Yes, I should congratulate you on your new job! (Or should that be sympathise? Either way I think you will do a good job and I will try to help out where I can.
For the OP: I have entered a bug report https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/+bug/1743624
Wow: that was quick, fixed already 
One other tool button was not working.
thank you @bobc I will keep an eye on it. will try to contribute once i get more comfortable with kicad. kinda newb here
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