ls-go

You want to be able to glean a lot of information as quickly as possible from ls.
Colors can help your mind parse the information.
You can configure ls to color the output a little bit.
Configuring ls is a hassle though, and the colors are limited.
Instead, you can use ls-go. It is highly colored by default.
It has much fewer flags so you can get the behavior you want more easily.
The colors are beautiful and semantic. A terminal with xterm-256 colors is required.