colorls [1] is written in Ruby. If you don't have this language on your system yet, install it quickly:

sudo apt install ruby ruby-dev ruby-colorize

Then you download a character set that you really like from Nerd Fonts [2] – say, Roboto Mono Nerd Font Regular. After unpacking the ZIP file, I moved the character set to the /usr/share/fonts/truetype/roboto/ directory on my Ubuntu desktop; users of other distributions may need to change this path.

Why do I even get this font when there are a few dozen others preinstalled? Because Nerd Font's character sets are more extensive, containing more symbols, special characters, glyphs, and emojis than usual (Figure 1). Now I select the new font in my terminal's preferences. This fulfills the preconditions, and I can proceed to install colorls by typing:

sudo gem install colorls

Figure 1: On Nerd Font's Cheat Sheet [3], you can see the extended character sets.

The developers know that nobody types colorls 50 times a day. I recommend that you create an lc alias in your ~/.bashrc:

alias lc='colorls'

If you use a light terminal background, you should always specify --light or, preferably, make it permanent by appending it to the .bashrc alias. The output then resembles that in Figure 2 – note the cute icons and bright colors. Light-shy workers can choose a variant optimized for dark terminals by specifying --dark.

Figure 2: colorls --light prints files and directories in a light color scheme.

No Blind Faith in Color

Speaking of the downside: colorls is a new implementation of ls, which does not implement all options identically and others not at all. My big favorites -l and --sort=size fortunately work. If you type -f, colorls only displays files; -d only displays directories. If I want to see both, I have the choice between --sd (directories first – note the two dashes!) and --sf (files first).

If you would like a brightly colored ls, but have problems with colorls because of missing parameters, schedule a test run with exa [4], which doesn't offer any fancy icons but does support almost all the ls parameters and adds some on top. Especially with the defaults, exa impresses – for example, the -h parameter (human readable), which outputs file sizes in human-readable units instead of bytes, is implicit.