Hello there, I am using rhino in Mac and a week ago I stopped seeing some columns in the layers panel. I right-clicked to enable and disable them from the dropdown menu but that did not work. Plus the default state of all layers has alpha 0 so they are totally transparent. Here is a screenshot.
Hi - You are looking at the Layout and detail layer information panel, not the regular Layers panel. When you go to a layout, you should see that they “come to life”.
For the regular Layers panel, select the gear icon in the top right corner and check Layers.
-wim
Wow, I feel stupid 
thank you so much.