I just noticed some de facto treatment of the NO_COLOR env var. https://no-color.org/
I was considering having ls --color=auto honor this, but then thought it is not actually needed in ls, since we give fine grained control over the colors / styles used. For example one might very well always want at least some distinguishing of files and directories, with bold / bright etc. which can be achieved now with LS_COLORS. Or looking at it another way, ls is ubiquitous enough that it's probably already color configured as the user desires, and having ls honor the less fine grained NO_COLOR flag, would result in less flexibility. cheers, Pádraig