You can customize LS_COLORS if you want, but I've never been mad at the defaults. Also, I prefer c-style escapes, which allows you to copy and paste the filename and use it in other commands:
alias ls='ls --color=auto -F -b -T 0 -A'
-F classify entries with (*/=>@|)
-b use c-style escapes instead of quoting
-T 0 do not use tabs for alignment
-A show all dotfiles except . and ..
Plus, I find colors to be insanely useful when my old eyes try to read 'ip' output, so I really do prefer:
I really wish there were a unified environment variable to enable colors for everything instead of having a separate one for everything or having to clutter your bashrc with a trillion aliases.
The default for o+w directories having a bright green background colour with grey text is kind of annoying to me, I suppose you could argue that o+w directories should be annoying so that you are aware of their existance and risk
What shade of blue do you have configured? The default is this impossible to read shade of dark blue, so the first thing I do is configure a different, readable shade of not-so-dark blue.
