I'm curious why Konsole displays "ls -F" and "ls --color" by default but no other x-type terminals (I'm aware of) seem to? I've never been able to figure out how to get other terminals in x to do so by default. Additionally, I've noticed in Slack versions past that "ls --color" doesn't work, at least by default, when running Konsole under an x desktop other than KDE. It's perplexing. I've read /etc/DIR_COLORS and the hidden config files in my home directory, not to mention man page for ls and documentation on various terminals, but I just can't track down the answer. Google hasn't helped much either. I love a mystery but unfortunately this one has gone on for years. With varying degrees of elbow grease I've been able to get Slack to do most of what I wanted. This isn't really a big deal since I can always just use KDE or switch to a non-x shell. It just bugs me that I can't solve the problem.

If I understand you right, you can make an alias for ls like

alias ls='ls --color=auto'

That will make ls use colours in any terminal. I'm not sure how or why konsole does this automatically though.

Thanks Dive - I created .bashrc with this:

alias ls='ls -hF --color'

That does the trick.

It's because Pat has configured konsole to launch a 'login shell' (which sources /etc/profile), while other terminal emulators are not configured this way by default.
I don't know what Pat's reason for doing this was - but I'm guessing that it's to avoid problem reports about DIR_COLORS (and other things) not working in runlevel 4 (as kdm/xdm and friends don't source /etc/profile when a user logs in). Whether this was the only reason, or even a reason at all, for that change, I don't know. Perhaps the idea was that most new users (who don't know how to solve this on their own) will be using kde and konsole, and anyone using another window manager and/or terminal emulator should be able to figure it out.

Anyway, one way to solve it is to add this to your $HOME/.bashrc

rworkman - thanks for the info. Somehow I'd never noticed until yesterday that there are "shells" and "login shells". My ignorance never fails to astound me, especially pertaining to Linux.

I believe Yakuake also behaves like this and gave me problems until I twigged that it was looking for a ~/.bash_profile and not reading my ~/.bashrc.

Now I just have a .bash_profile that has one line:

[[ -f ~/.bashrc ]] && . ~/.bashrc

to ensure that .bashrc gets read by whichever term I use.