I think this is a simple issue of file permissions but I don't have enough knowledge. :(
My htdocs directory (in Ubuntu) earlier had 770 permissions, because I thought "who would want to view this other than me?" but then I saw that even the browser wasn't able to read the files. So I changed the permissions to 775 but now the IDEs I'm using to write code tell me that the file is read-only. Does that mean the IDEs get classified into the "others" group?
What is the solution? Do I always have to run the IDEs as root? And what are the correct file permissions so that when I upload these to my live server there won't be a problem?