quarrel4you

One option is to use less -R to see the pretty colors.
The boring option is to use ls --color=never and be sad.

You can actually do chmod +777,u+rwx,go-w foo to make the logic easier if you want to force a starting assumption.

Careful: chmod -X also looks for any existing exec bits:

$ umask 0
$ >foo >bar
$ ls -al foo bar
-rw-rw-rw- 1 user group 0 Sep 10 00:00 bar
-rw-rw-rw- 1 user group 0 Sep 10 00:00 foo
$ chmod o+x foo
$ ls -al foo bar
-rw-rw-rw- 1 user group 0 Sep 10 00:00 bar
-rw-rw-rwx 1 user group 0 Sep 10 00:00 foo
$ chmod u=rwX,g=rX,o=rX foo bar
$ ls -al foo bar
-rw-r--r-- 1 user group 0 Sep 10 00:00 bar
-rwxr-xr-x 1 user group 0 Sep 10 00:00 foo