This page has info on how to see htaccess (and other hidden files) using some of the popular free ftp clients.
http://www.mfr.f2s.com/ftp/
I did it with my Cpanel 10x podz & shadow 🙂
I’ve been using PSPad recently to do editing and publishing via FTP. It hs a preference which allows seeing hidden files on the server and enabling this will show the .htaccess file. PSPad is available here.
Yes.You can chmod in your ftp client.
For reference.
To chmod in FileZilla, right click on the remote files and select “File Attributes”.
To view hidden files in FZ, menu item View > Show Hidden Files
In the Cpanel, I see hidden files and permissions by default. To chmod in Cpanel, select a file, and “Change permissions” appears at the top right. Not a particularly intuitive user interface but it works..