Does anyone know if there is a way to set the default visible/invisible layers in klayout?

You can save the current visibility status in the layer list from File -> Save Layer Properties and then overwrite the .lyp file that comes with the tech files. You can also just modify the existing .lyp file (under

~/.klayout/tech/SKY130

for example) by setting those below to false/true as desired.

<visible>true</visible>

This option doesn't actually seem to do that... 😕