right now if you want to reuse a layout, the best way is to save it as a preset. layouts are currently disabled with the page type defaults, but we have talked about introducing that in a latter release.

Layouts on Default Pages would rock!

Will keep my eye out for this...
is it in 5.4.0.6 ??

Okay, not to be a complete turd here, but...
Why the HECK is this not a feature yet? This is severely crippling a project of mine, and I have to admit, for all it's awesomeness, this is just flat out something I expected from C5 out of the box. C'mon guys - we've told you we need it, step it up!

First I realised you cannot copy layouts to the scrapbook. That was a dissapointment. Then that we cannot use layouts on default pages. Also a major problem for a site I'm developing.

Layouts are intended for minor site changes, not for structure...
If you're going to use a layout many times or everywhere, you're supposed to code that (HTML and CSS)...
Layouts are not convenient anyway, they add a lot of unnecessary 'divs'.

Plus, Concrete5 is a CMS, not a WYSIWYG website builder...

just saying

Sure, I see your point. But I was using easy-tabs from the marketplace, and it relies on layout. I know it's not very elegant and if I was a coder I would obviously be using my own code, but I'm not. Plus I need the client to be able to edit content in most of the tabbed areas. I've ended up using a coded workaround for the tabbed page list, the client will not need to change that bit thankfully.

For the record, this was exactly the reason I needed it as well. I'd gladly code the Easy-Tabs into the hard code if I could figure out how (and I've tried).

I tried hard coding it in the theme too but could not get it to work. In the end I fell back on my first solution, which was the simple tabbing system from the Skeleton CSS Framework.http://getskeleton.com/ I'm just using this for a tabbed page list nav but still using easy tabs for other content. Skeleton uses a bit of jquery and CSS using unordered lists. I'd only moved to Easy Tabs becuase the first solution would be too difficult for my client to use. I was going to use Designer Content to help make the tabbed content but turned out it only allows 1 rich text area per custom block :( Mind you Easy Tabs is a bit awkard once you have a few tab sets on a page.

Another solution you could try is the scapbook tabs, I imagine that could be hard coded in your theme. It still uses multiple blocks but does not require layout mode.