I know we can currently lock elements/group,etc on screen but I’m wondering if anyone else would find a ‘Lock’ field in the ‘Layers’ Palette helpful next to the ‘visible’ and ‘colour’ columns? I think it would be great to be able to simply tick the box to lock the layers you want visible but off limits. Just a thought. 
Yes I miss being able to lock complete layers.
Also to freeze complete layers. (Freeze is the same as lock, except frozen objects cannot be selected. They are removed from any selection set.)
In AutoCAD if you attempted to move a selection set containing any selected locked entities, an error would be spit out in the console. You’d have to either turn off or freeze those entities’ layers, and repeat the original edit.
But SketchUp doesn’t give an error in this scenario. It just ignores the move or edit with regard to locked objects, and happily does whatever to the unlocked things in the selection set. So, we have gotten along without a specific freeze property for SketchUp.
But freeze does come in handy sometimes, when you do want the objects visible, but you do not want the mouse to interact with them. (As if they are hidden.) In SketchUp, this would mean we’d not want the inferencing engine to “see” frozen objects, or objects on frozen layers.
Quick workaround:
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select one object on the desired layer
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use Thomthoms Selection toys to select “all on same layer”
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use “hide” in context menu
It’d be a relatively simple Plugin to make:
‘Lock ALL on Layer’ [dialog to choose the Layer by name], then anything that responds to ‘locked?’ is set locked=true…
Its corollary would be:
‘Unlock ALL on Layer’ [dialog to choose the Layer by name], then anything that responds to ‘locked?’ is set locked=false…