MacOS Terminal – Changing Terminal Color

If I understand you correctly, this likely has to do with how terminals work. In bash they are hidden by most aliases of ls.

Try ls -a or \ls -a if that isn't working. This is to show all files and escape an alias you might have.

Put simply, the terminal doesn't care about finder preferences because it isn't finder.

If not, then perhaps terminal simply doesn't respect the finder settings.

I don't think colorizing the file names of regular files is possible with ls alone (i.e. without postprocessing the output with another script):

1. The manual page for ls (shown when you type man ls) does not mention this possibility.

2. I would expect that the ls coming with Mac OS X is very similar to the BSD version of ls, since there seems to be little motivation for Apple to make changes in this area. The source code for BSD's ls is available online, e.g. the FreeBSD version is on GitHub. The function which selects the color for a file name is colortype() in the source file bin/ls/print.c. And checking the source code it is clear that at least the BSD version of ls does not have the ability to change color when printing the names of a regular file.