Things have changed a little since the original request. alacritty sets $COLORTERM, and dircolors now auto accepts that since: https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/commit/75c9fc674
There are some complications with remote shells, but they should boil down to setting up ssh to send/accept COLORTERM. For some background for setting colors based on env vars from the Fedora side of things at least, see: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/256_Color_Terminals https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Drop_256term.sh cheers, Pádraig.
