I'm getting tired of looking at my files.
It seems like there aren't many options to modifying the look of Apache's Options +Indexes .htaccess layout without having root access to the server. It also seems like you can't browse directories and subdirectories safely through 1 PHP file in the root in a similar fashion (for that I would be able to style.)
I have seen tuts on how to change the length of certain outputs, etc, in .htaccess, but perhaps there is a programming language I am not aware of that can emulate the same type of file browsing safely and still be able to take on style properties.
You can use HeaderName HEADER.html and ReadmeName FOOTER.html to create a custom header and footer. You can include some CSS into the header to make the list look a bit more pretty.
Not sure why you would think PHP is not save to use. You indeed need to be careful to not give access to files outside of the specified folder, but that is not very hard to do.