Show hidden .htaccess files by default
You can use Ctrl+H if you are browsing files using Ubuntu File Browser (Nautilus)
You can set an alias to ls so that it will always list 'dot' files; the syntax varies a bit depending of the shell used; for bash it is:
alias ls='ls -a'
Add the above line to your ~/.bashrc. The drawback is this will list all files starting with a dot, every time.