hi, so yeah, export LS_OPTIONS='--group-directories-first --color=auto' don’t do what I expected it to do
how do I use it? thank you in advance for your replies.
I would think space in the beginning would matter
You can experiment with the setting without having to fiddle with export
$ LS_OPTIONS=' --group-directories-first --color=auto'
$ ls $LS_OPTIONS ~/
Played around with it - a globl LS_OPTIONS environment variable appears to be ignored on Manjaro, it could be something that is specific to another distribution e.g. Ubuntu - but I don’t really know.
Looking at the ls(1) — Arch manual pages there is no mention of LS_OPTIONS only LS_COLORS
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If you have multiple parameters you must define it as bash array eg.:
LS_OPTIONS=("--color=auto" "--group-directories-first")
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Use an array like @tomek said.
However the export will only work until you logout or reboot. If you want it to be permanent, you should to add it to your ~/.zshrc
echo 'export LS_OPTIONS=("--color=auto" "--group-directories-first")' >> ~/.zshrc
As it turns out, this (perhaps) little known feature is part of Manjaro’s zsh config. I found it in /usr/share/zsh/manjaro-zsh-config (last 4 lines).
# File and Dir colors for ls and other outputs
export LS_OPTIONS='--color=auto'
eval "$(dircolors -b)"
alias ls='ls $LS_OPTIONS'
Ahh - I see - searched in manuals - but since I don’t use zsh - it went completely over my head 
thank you.
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I do use zsh, but I have a custom config so it didn’t work for me either.
The fact they got an error made me think it might be in the default config.