David Tryse has written a variety of useful tools for Google Earth in the past few years. His latest is quite simple, but very useful — Google Earth Hotkeys.

It does exactly what the name describes; you can set various hotkeys to show/hide any of the built-in players, as well as any customer layers that you have inside of your “Places” folder.

From his site:

You can configure F1 – F12 (and shift F1 – F12) to show or hide any list of layers you want. Layer names are case sensitive, and to hide a layer start the layer name with a minus sign. To change several layers at once separate the layer names with a pipe character (|). It actually works for My Places custom layers as well as built-in content under Layers.

By default F6/shift-F6 shows/hides Borders and Labels and 3D Buildings, F7 hides all layers and F8 shows nearly all layers. F12 opens the window to edit the hotkeys.

The one downside, of course, is that it’s Windows only. However, if you find yourself often toggling various layers on and off as you work in Google Earth this could be a very useful time-saver.