Perhaps this is something that is actually not a "fact," and is something more like an "opinion."
Advocate? No. Would I excuse it? Yes.
When I write tools, I write two kinds: ones that care intended to be consumed by something and ones that are not. If something is even marginally the former, I assume the former.
I can excuse a tool having output changing behaviour if it's the latter, and only in the case of dropping ANSI escape codes, but only because it makes sense to pipe such output into, say `pbcopy` and `tee`, without the escape codes for capture.
Automagically removing ANSI escape codes is the _most_ I'd be comfortable with, and only because is _reduces surprise_. Something sent to stdout should be the same as something sent to a pipeline, but I can forgive somebody adding ANSI codes to make things clearer to a human reader, for whom those are invisible in the stream.
Would I advocate for `ls` not to send ANSI escape codes to a pipeline? Yes. Do I think it's a good idea to pipe from `ls`? Most certainly not! `ls` is written with assumptions about the consuming terminal that defeat the principal of lease surprise.
Which is eminently reasonable. But your hard-line stance expressed above is less so.
> Bringing `ls` into this isn't a great idea.
I perceived your hardline stance as unreasonable personally, and so I wondered where the format changing functionality that most 'ls' implementations perform based on pipe detection fit in your worldview. It seems to me like your hard-line stance is not actually so hard-line. But you do a lot of mental gymnastics to get there, and you end up asserting that 'ls' shouldn't be used in pipelines. Which seems kinda nuts to me to be honest.
The better answer here IMO is that one should use "good judgment" when it comes to changing things based on automatic pipe detection. It's a matter of taste and there are more use cases for it than simply removing ANSI codes.
Ideally, I'd just prefer is libxo was common outside of FreeBSD, and I didn't have to worry about massaging stuff into structured data.
