Colours & Theming

lsgo colours everything — filenames, permission bits, sizes, dates, Git status — out of the box, then layers any LS_COLORS overrides on top.

When colour is used

By default (--color=auto), colour is only emitted when standard output is a terminal — piping lsgo into another program or a file produces plain text automatically. Override this with:

lsgo --color=always   # force colour, even when piped
lsgo --color=never    # never colour, even in a terminal

Setting the NO_COLOR environment variable to any value disables colour entirely, regardless of --color, following the no-color.org convention.

LS_COLORS

lsgo reads the standard LS_COLORS environment variable — the same one GNU ls and other colourful file listers use — and understands both the recognised UI keys and arbitrary filename glob rules.

Format: a :-separated list of key=value pairs, where each value is a ;-separated list of SGR parameter codes (the same numbers used in raw ANSI escapes, without the \x1b[ / m):

export LS_COLORS="di=1;34:ln=36:*.md=1;33:*.log=2"

Recognised UI keys

Key	Applies to
di	Directories
fi	Regular files
ln	Symbolic links
pi	Named pipes (FIFOs)
so	Sockets
bd	Block devices
cd	Character devices
ex	Executable files
or	Broken/orphaned symlinks

Any other key (*.txt=, *.tar.gz=, etc.) is treated as a filename glob rule rather than a UI element, and applies on top of lsgo's built-in per-extension colouring. Keys LS_COLORS defines that have no equivalent here (MULTIHARDLINK, DOOR, and similar) are accepted without error but don't change anything, so a full dircolors-style LS_COLORS string doesn't produce spurious warnings.

Supported SGR codes

Code(s)	Meaning
1 2 3 4 5 7 8 9	Bold, dim, italic, underline, blink, reverse, hidden, strikethrough
30–37	Standard foreground colours
40–47	Standard background colours
38;5;N / 48;5;N	256-colour palette foreground/background (N 0–255)
38;2;R;G;B / 48;2;R;G;B	24-bit truecolour foreground/background

Unrecognised or malformed codes are ignored rather than raising an error, matching the tolerant parsing of the reference LS_COLORS implementations.

--color-scale

Shades file sizes by magnitude instead of a single fixed colour, so it's easier to spot the largest files in a long listing at a glance:

lsgo -l --color-scale

Icons

Pass --icons to show a small glyph before each filename, resolved by extension and by well-known filenames (Makefile, Dockerfile, and so on). These are Nerd Font private-use-area code points — they render as tofu/placeholder boxes without a patched Nerd Font installed in your terminal.

--no-icons always wins if both are given.

Control the gap between an icon and its filename with:

export LS_ICON_SPACING=2   # default is 1

Other relevant environment variables

Variable	Effect
LS_COLORS	Customise the colour scheme, as above
NO_COLOR	Disable colour entirely when set, to any value
COLUMNS	Override the detected terminal width
TIME_STYLE	Default for --time-style (default, iso, long-iso, full-iso)
LS_ICON_SPACING	Number of spaces between an icon and its filename