If you run `dircolors --print-database|less` you will see that GNU ls only highlights/colors the path/filenames according to a simplistic scheme where a file can only resolve to one type even though on many terminals today "foreground overlays background overlays bold/italic/etc". (https://github.com/c-blake/lc#vector-typemulti-dimensionalit... has a more advanced idea.)

This tool by triyanox -- just from the screen shot if you click through -- will also colorize permission masks and sizes, dates, user & group.

I managed to scroll past the screenshot twice (now and earlier) before it had loaded.

Two settings for ls make some of the colouring less useful to me.

BLOCK_SIZE='1 formats sizes in bytes with comma separators. TIME_STYLE=long-iso formats the dates sensibly.

This means entries line up in neater columns.

  -rwxr-xr-x 1 root   root            852 2024-02-23 22:31 zsh5
  -rwxr-xr-x 1 root   root      1,022,760 2024-08-09 04:33 zstd
  lrwxrwxrwx 1 root   root              4 2024-08-09 04:33 zstdcat -> zstd